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Uncharted Territory

自分が読んで興味深く感じた英文記事を中心に取り上げる予定です

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TOEICの賞味期限

 
1980年実施の第3回TOEICを再び眺めています。パート7はe-mailやWeb siteがないのでさすがに時代の流れを感じますが、パート2を見ると以下のように普通に出題しても35年前の試験問題とはわからないものばかりでした。

(一般的な会話)
How about joining us for dinner?
- I’d like to very much.

How did you like the new art exhibit?
- It was an excellent.


(職場での会話)
When do you plan to award the contract?
- Any day now.

Has Mr. Karec given you something to do or can you take care of something for me?
- I’m free to help you.


Yutaが判断した限り、ちょっとこれはでないかなと思うのは、以下の2つぐらいでした。

Do you think they’ll ever bring inflation under control?
- I hope so.

Would you like this letter on bond paper or onionskin?
- Bond would be better.


bring inflation under control(インフレを抑制する)のように一般的な経済状況を言及することは少ないですね。あと、2つめのbond paperやonionskin paperといった紙の種類もでることはなさそうです。

日向先生がGSLという基礎単語の学習を進めていますが、TOEICを通しても時代で風化しない基礎的な表現を学べると言えそうです。あくまでもスタート、基礎固めにすぎませんが、TOEIC学習の有用性を感じることのできる点だと思います。
スポンサーサイト



 

小保方さんは氷山の一角

 
「再現性」は英語ではReproducibilityというようです。ワシントンポストで研究不正が起こりやすい状況とそれを防ごうとする新しい取り組みを取り上げた記事がありした。日本のあの事件は突発的なものではなく、科学界でありふれた問題が先鋭的なかたちで現れたことがわかります。

Health & Science
The new scientific revolution: Reproducibility at last

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By Joel Achenbach January 27

記事の導入で紹介されていたのは研究不正を行っていたDiederik Stapelというオランダの心理学者でした。このような状況を受けて、データ共有や実験の透明性を高めていこうという取り組みがあるようです。

The Stapel case was an outlier, an extreme example of scientific fraud. But this and several other high-profile cases of misconduct resonated in the scientific community because of a much broader, more pernicious problem: Too often, experimental results can’t be reproduced.

That doesn’t mean the results are fraudulent or even wrong. But in science, a result is supposed to be verifiable by a subsequent experiment. An irreproducible result is inherently squishy.

And so there’s a movement afoot, and building momentum rapidly. Roughly four centuries after the invention of the scientific method, the leaders of the scientific community are recalibrating their requirements, pushing for the sharing of data and greater experimental transparency.

Top-tier journals, such as Science and Nature, have announced new guidelines for the research they publish.


ここでリンクが貼られたのが雑誌Scienceの社説でした。

Science 2 January 2015:
EDITORIAL
Data, eternal
Marcia McNutt

During 2014, Science worked with members of the research community, other publishers, and representatives of funding agencies on many initiatives to increase transparency and promote reproducibility in the published research literature. Those efforts will continue in 2015. Connected to that progress, and an essential element to its success, an additional focus will be on making data more open, easier to access, more discoverable, and more thoroughly documented. My own commitment to these goals is deeply held, for I learned early in my career that interpretations come and go, but data are forever.

ワシントンポストの記事ではデータ共有については製薬会社の試みを紹介しています。

The pharmaceutical companies are part of this movement. Big Pharma has massive amounts of money at stake and wants to see more rigorous pre-clinical results from outside laboratories. The academic laboratories act as lead-generators for companies that make drugs and put them into clinical trials. Too often these leads turn out to be dead ends.

Some pharmaceutical companies are now even willing to share data with each other, a major change in policy in a competitive business.


しかし、記事ではデータ共有だけでは不十分といいます。権威のある雑誌に論文が載ることに重きが置かれている現状では論文掲載のためにデータ操作が行われやすいというのです。

But Ivan Oransky, founder of the blog Retraction Watch, says data-sharing isn’t enough. The incentive structure in science remains a problem, because there is too much emphasis on getting published in top journals, he said. Science is competitive, funding is hard to get and tenure harder, and so even an honest researcher may wind up stretching the data to fit a publishable conclusion.

“Everything in science is based on publishing a peer-reviewed paper in a high-ranking journal. Absolutely everything,” Oransky said. “You want to get a grant, you want to get promoted, you want to get tenure. That’s how you do it. That’s the currency of the realm.”


そこで紹介されているのは再現性を担保してくれる組織Center for Open Science。Youtubeにも動画がありました。

A core scientific principle
Reproducibility is a core scientific principle. A result that can’t be reproduced is not necessarily erroneous: Perhaps there were simply variables in the experiment that no one detected or accounted for. Still, science sets high standards for itself, and if experimental results can’t be reproduced, it’s hard to know what to make of them.

“The whole point of science, the way we know something, is not that I trust Isaac Newton because I think he was a great guy. The whole point is that I can do it myself,” said Brian Nosek, the founder of a start-up in Charlottesville, Va., called the Center for Open Science. “Show me the data, show me the process, show me the method, and then if I want to, I can reproduce it.”




STAP騒動は以下の2パラグラフで触れらていています。

In early 2014, the scientific world was rocked by a tragic case in Japan. A young scientist, Haruko Obokata, claimed to have found evidence for a phenomenon called “STAP,” stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency — a way to manipulate ordinary cells to turn them into stem cells capable of growing into a variety of tissues.

But no one else could reproduce the experiment. An investigation found Obokata guilty of misconduct, and she later resigned from her institute. The journal Nature retracted the STAP papers, and then the case took a horrific turn in August, when Obokata’s mentor, the highly respected scientist Yoshiki Sasai, hanged himself.


オープンで検証可能なプラットフォームを作ること。英語学習、英語試験でもそのような状況が望ましいはずです。過去問や正答率などが自由に閲覧できたらどんなに素晴らしいことか、学習者と教師がどれだけ恩恵にあずかれるか。

ピケティの本もサイトで生データを公開していますよね。彼の結論だけでなく、こういった研究手法も参考にしたいものです。


 

雑誌Timeを読もう

 
雑誌Timeを読むメリットの一つに、アメリカで何が話題になっているか、基本的な背景知識をバランスよく得られることがあります。明日のスーパーボールを前にしたケイティ・ペリーの記者会見を見て改めて感じました。



I don't think I'm so much of an expert on the game of football, but I think I can assure everyone in here, nothing in my performance will be deflated.

背景知識がないとわからないジョークに対して、NFLジャパンの記事ではうまくフォローして説明してくれています。こういう補足説明をなかなか入れられないものなんですよね。

【SB現地レポ】ケイティ・ペリー「ショーにはライオンとサメ登場」
2015年01月30日(金) 13:36

【アリゾナ29日=三尾圭】現地29日午後、メディアセンターでスーパーボウルのハーフタイムショー記者会見が行われ、アメリカンフットボールが描かれたミニのドレスで登場したケイティ・ペリーが「音と映像を組み合わせた最高のショーを約束する。私のパフォーマンスはペシャンコにはならない」とペイトリオッツを襲う空気圧疑惑をネタにしたコメントを交えながら、スーパーボウルを盛り上げることを誓った。

先週Timeの(リンク先では20ページに)Deflatedという記事で知りました。この空気圧疑惑はDeflategateというスキャンダルになっているようですね。

US magazineのサイトはこの言及を丁寧に説明してくれています。

Katy Perry Mocks Tom Brady's "Deflategate," Marshawn Lynch in Super Bowl Press Conference
CELEBRITY NEWS
JAN. 29, 2015 AT 6:00PM BY RACHEL MCRADY

Perry didn’t stop there, later declaring, “I think I can assure everyone in here that nothing in my performance will be deflated.”

This was yet another jab at the stars of the Sunday, Feb. 1 game. New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is in the middle of his “Deflategate” scandal. Brady has been accused of deflating footballs to his advantage prior to the AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts, which secured the Patriots a spot in the Super Bowl.


もうひとつは、I'm here so I won't get finedのくだり。これも元ネタを知らないと面白くもなく不快な応答と感じてしまうでしょうね。NFLジャパンの記事は以下のように説明してくれています。

 「両チームに気になる選手はいるか?」と芸能記者から質問されると、「罰金を避けるために、ここに来ただけ」とシーホークスRBマーショーン・リンチの答えを真似して会場を沸かせた。



「罰金回避のためにいるだけ」のRBリンチ、それでも罰金処分に?
2015年01月29日(木) 10:12
 シアトル・シーホークスのランニングバック(RB)マーション・リンチは、現地27日の記者会見で「罰金を避けるためにここにいる」との返答に終始。しかしそこまでしたにもかかわらず、罰金処分を受ける可能性が浮上している。


US magazineの先程の記事はこの点についても丁寧に説明してくれています。

Katy Perry and her fireworks inflicted some burns on Thursday, Jan. 29 at the Super Bowl press conference. Clad in a long-sleeve royal blue crop top and skirt ensemble with an orange football print, the halftime performer, 30, kicked off the conference, answering the first question, “I’m just here so I don’t get fined.”

Perry was poking fun at the Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch, who gave the same answer — “I’m just here so I don’t get fined” — at Tuesday’s NFL Media Day for 30 different reporters’ questions.

Lynch’s media boycott has been widely covered in the sports world. He later declared in a different press conference that he only cares what his family thinks about him, saying, “All week I done told y’all what’s up. I don’t know what story y’all trying to get out of me.”




雑誌TIMEのカバーツーカバーを続けていると、知らずにこういった背景知識がついてきますから、より深い理解が可能になっていきます。雑誌TIMEとEconomistの違いは、TIMEの方がアメリカのカルチャーやスポーツの話題も積極的に載せていることですね。Economistはその辺はずっと禁欲的ですから。
 

Back into the stone age

 
悪口を言うのは行儀がよくないのはわかっていますが、久々にナンジャこリャの単語本にあいました。


TOEIC(R)テストはじめから英単語2400 (東進ブックス)TOEIC(R)テストはじめから英単語2400 (東進ブックス)
(2015/01/26)
高橋 潔

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コンセプトは素晴らしいんですよね。文句ないです。このコンセプトが体現できた単語本は未だかつてないですから。

TOEICテスト対策の最初の一冊
中学レベルの単語からスモールステップで、TOEICに必要な単語を収録!
英語は苦手だけどTOEICを受けたい人
しばらく英語から遠ざかってしまった人
におススメです!!
【本書の特長】
(1)中学英単語からのTOEIC対策!
中学英単語からTOEIC難単語まで、8段階のレベルでスモールステップ。
(2)使用頻度の高い単語を厳選!
TOEICテストはもちろん、日常生活でも使用頻度の高い単語を厳選。
(3)読解や英作文にも使いやすい句例
お決まりのフレーズやニュースやニュースで使われる語など、
(4)米・英・加・豪の音声を収録!
実際のTOEICテストと同様、米・英・加・豪のネイティブスピーカーによる音声付き。

ただ、単語の選択、語義、例文、すべてがTOEICを参照していないのがバレバレの残念な本です。10年前、ヒロ前田さんや神崎先生、中村澄子先生が登場する前だったらこのレベルでもよかったかもしれませんが、デルボが出て5年経っていて、金フレ、出る語句、プラチナが出ている今こりゃないでしょ。

表現の自由、出版の自由を認める風潮の今、出版の自由を認める代わりに表現の自由を行使させてもらいました(苦笑)

TOEICの傾向に合わせた教材、問題集というのは今の人たちには当然に思えるかもしれませんが、ヒロ前田さんや神崎先生、中村澄子先生、早川先生たちの取り組みがあってこその状況なんですよね。
 

ミーハーでいいじゃないか

 


Still Aliceという映画でJulianne Mooreがゴールデングローブ賞を受賞したということで初めてこの作品を知りました。近くの図書館で原作の洋書があったのでさっそく読み始めています。


Still AliceStill Alice
(2009/01/06)
Lisa Genova

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この作品の特徴についてMooreはアルツハイマー患者の視点から語られている点がユニークだと言っています。確かに、小川洋子さんの『博士の愛した数式』もお手伝いさんの視点による物語でしたね。



It was such an extraordinary story. It was the first time I’ve ever read a story about the disease from the point of view of the patient, you know, the person who’s struggling with it. You know, generally when you tell the story, it’s about caregivers and their perspective. This story is completely subjective and very, very unusual.
 

Effective immediately

 
非常事態宣言まで出された米国東海岸の大雪。被害が想定ほどではなくてよかったですね。ちょっと出遅れ感がありますがニューヨーク知事の非常事態宣言を確認しておきます。



冒頭でI'm declaring a state of emergency effective immediately.と語っています。

緊急のこともありeffective immediatelyとしていますね。TOEICでeffectiveが使われるケースは人事の告知などが多いでしょうか。Effective January 29のように日付や下記の例のように曜日が続くかたちで使われています。

公式問題集vol1パート7

As you have probably heard, I will be assuming responsibility for leading Randolph Chemical effective Monday morning.


雪を楽しむ余裕があった人もいたようです。Let it goのダジャレでLet it snowと歌っている人がいます(笑)goとsnowは同じ発音で終わっていますね。


 

火曜日に70周年

 


火曜日の1月27日はアウシュビッツ収容所解放の70周年なのですね。Guardianのツイートで知りました。

Auschwitz liberation 70th anniversary: share your perspectives
We’d like to find out your perspectives on being Jewish in Europe today, and hear how you’re commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz next Tuesday

Next Tuesday marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where more than one million European Jews were murdered in gas chambers. British survivors of the Holocaust are expected to gather in central London for an event themed around the phrase ‘keep the memory alive’. The BBC is marking the anniversary, commemorated annually around the world as Holocaust memorial day, with a series of programmes including a screening of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s acclaimed 10-hour documentary from 1985. Other events are taking place around the world in countries such as Argentina, South Africa, New Zealand and Japan.

For most members of Europe’s Jewish community, whose family and friends endured the horrors of the second world war, memories are never too distant. Since then, for the most part, Europe has been a safe place to live but events in Paris two weeks ago have significantly raised concerns for some Jewish communities.

Since the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices and the subsequent targeting of a kosher supermarket which left four Jewish shoppers dead, there have been heightened security measures for Jewish communities in Europe. Following the killings the French government has deployed several thousand troops and gendarmes to protect Jewish sites, in Belgium soldiers and police have been deployed too after a suspected terrorist plot was thwarted there, and in the UK the Home secretary Theresa May has ordered increased police patrols in Jewish areas.


イギリスでもHolocaust Memorial Day 2015としてイベントが開催されるようですが、資料なんかも揃っているようです。



Holocaust Memorial Day 2015 resources
Tuesday, 27 January, 2015

Events are already taking place around the UK to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2015: Keep the memory alive. Our free resources will help you to hold an activity and engage your community in the powerful messages of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Keep the memory alive is the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2015
27 January 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. 2015 will also be the 20th anniversary of the Genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia. It is particularly appropriate that the theme for this major anniversary year focuses on memory. To find out more about the theme, read the 2015 theme vision.


時代の流れを感じるのはアプリを配布していることでしょうか。もちろんサイトでも同内容を見ることができますが、アプリで伝えたい内容をまとめるというのも一つの流れなんですね。

70 years after the Holocaust, new app brings its voices to modern devices
70 Voices will enable Android and iOS owners to hear from ‘victims, perpetrators and bystanders’ to commemorate anniversary
The 70 Voices app will offer first-hand Holocaust memories.
Stuart Dredge
Monday 19 January 2015 12.12 GMT

Seventy years after the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, an Android and iOS application is aiming to provide new insights into the Holocaust for modern-day smartphone and tablet users.
70 Voices: Victims, Perpetrators and Bystanders is the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which has made it available as a free download through Google, Amazon and Apple’s app stores.
The app will offer 70 different perspectives on the Holocaust from people who were alive at the time, at a time when the number of people able to give firsthand accounts continues to dwindle.
The app will provide a different “voice” each day for the next 70 days, with a weekly podcast also exploring the material’s themes and implications. The app’s content will also be published on the 70 Voices website.


この音声はトランスクリプトもあり勉強になります。

70 VOICES PODCAST: WHAT WAS THE HOLOCAUST?
January 25, 2015

Click here to read the transcript of the podcast.

日本でも国連大学でイベントがあり、映画ショアーが上映されたりするようです。日本にもホロコースト記念館があるようですが、なんで福島県なんでしょうか。。。

ホロコースト記憶の国際デー2015 in 東京

クロードランズマン監督の70年代にユダヤ評議会の生き残りにインタビューした映像を基にした新しいドキュメンタリーがイギリスでは公開されているようです。



The Last of the Unjust review – doc about a divisive Holocaust survivor
Claude Lanzmann’s fascinating interview with the only Jewish ‘elder’ who negotiated with Adolf Eichmann is a subtle study in survivor non-guilt
Peter Bradshaw
Thursday 8 January 2015 21.15 GMT

At 87, Claude Lanzmann is still capable of enforcing his film-making personality on European cinema: he is a landmark in the shadow of his great subject, the Holocaust. His film, Shoah, is now best seen not merely as an incomparable record, but as an intervention in history, an insistence on eyewitness testimony and compelling truth. This new film is a remarkable companion to his masterpiece Shoah: a fascinating encounter, recorded in Rome in the 1970s, while working on his great film but not used at the time, for reasons that Lanzmann leaves us to ponder.

It is an interview with Benjamin Murmelstein, an Austrian Jew and last surviving “chairman” of the Theresienstadt ghetto, near Prague, a supposedly comfortable Potemkin-style arrangement that was part of a sickening pantomime of ostensible good faith after the Anschluss. Murmelstein explains that their inhabitants, and the world, were distracted with the fatuous fantasy of being shipped over to Madagascar: a cynical euphemism for the death marches and extermination, in which Murmelstein was held to be complicit. The Nazis coerced leading Jews to be their administrative “elders” there, a queasy use of Judeophobe-propagandist terminology, and Murmelstein was the last surviving example (his predecessors were murdered by the Nazis).

 

(自分メモ)戦争について

 





Atlantic Monthly [US] January - February 2015 (単号)Atlantic Monthly [US] January - February 2015 (単号)
(2015/01/09)
不明

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これから読もうと思うAtlanticの記事をメモ代わりに置いておきます。1万後近くの長い記事です(汗)

The Tragedy of the American Military
The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.

James Fallows
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015

Words checked = [10192]
Words in Oxford 3000™ = [86%]

メモついでにNYTのカクタニさんのイラク戦争小説の状況をまとめてくださった記事も載せておきます。全米図書賞のRedeploymentもイラク戦争でしたね。

Human Costs of the Forever Wars, Enough to Fill a Bookshelf
DEC. 25, 2014
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Words checked = [2958]
Words in Oxford 3000™ = [81%]

女性による戦争ものやイラク人による小説も紹介してくれています。確かに“You join the infantry to become a man”という表現はAmerican Sniperにもありました(笑)

More than a decade into these wars, books representing a growing array of perspectives are being published. There are still far more war books by men — and not only because they outnumber women in the military. As Kayla Williams, a former Arabic linguist and intelligence specialist in the Army and the author of two tough, funny and affecting memoirs (“Love My Rifle More Than You” and “Plenty of Time When We Get Home”) observes, people frequently say, “You join the infantry to become a man,” but no one says, “You go to war to become a woman.”

As for Iraqi-born writers, Hassan Blasim (“The Corpse Exhibition”) and Ahmed Saadawi (“Frankenstein in Baghdad”) — who have used Kafka-esque scenarios and magic realism to convey just how surreal and nightmarish day-to-day life for Iraqis has become — are gaining recognition in the West.

So far, fiction about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has tended to have a chamber music quality, using short stories, fable-like allegories or keyhole views (from individuals and platoons) to open small windows on those conflicts.

Why has there been no big, symphonic Iraq or Afghanistan novel? For one thing, “War and Peace"-like epics take time: Tolstoy published that novel some five decades after the French invasion of Russia, and Denis Johnson’s Vietnam novel, “Tree of Smoke,” appeared more than three decades after that war. With Vietnam — as well as with the AIDS crisis and the Holocaust — there has been a distinct trajectory, with reportage, personal testimony and more documentary works leading the way, followed by fiction that grows increasingly panoramic and experimental as the event recedes in time.



The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on TerrorThe Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror
(2009/08/27)
Dexter Filkins

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Forever Warのようなすぐれたルポタージュは出ているが、イラク戦争を扱った文学作品の大作はまだでていないと捉えているようです。原因の一つとして小説作品として昇華するための時間がまだ経っていないことをあげています。カクタニさんの記事を読んでForever Warを読みましたが、イラク戦争は10年以上も経つんですよね。。。
 

テストがなくなる日は近い?

 


アメリカの議会で、No Child Left Behindに代わる教育方針の法律が話し合われるようです。標準テストを基に補助金の額が変わるという方針がどうなるのか、注目ですね。それに合わせてのインタビューがPBS Newshourにありました。

Is ‘The Test’ failing American schools?
January 22, 2015 at 6:05 PM EST

GWEN IFILL: As Congress begins to tackle a new federal education law that would succeed No Child Left Behind, one of the major dividing lines is already clear. What is the proper role and use of testing?
It’s a question that has long touched a raw nerve among parents and educators.
A new book explores that controversy and testing’s possible future.
Hari Sreenivasan has our conversation from our New York studios.
HARI SREENIVASAN: On the one hand, parents know their children’s talents can’t be quantified by multiple choice tests. At the same time, they often want their children to do well on high-stakes exams.
A new book explores those issues and a growing backlash against testing in many circles. It’s called “The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing, But You Don’t Have to Be.”


テストの成績だけが全てではないと言ったおきまりの話もされています。継続して取り組む力perseveranceが重要という話も出ています。

HARI SREENIVASAN: There’s also this philosophical question on, is testing a good indicator of future outcomes, right?
So colleges are basing their entrance of certain applicants on two things, usually, a grade-point average and an SAT or ACT test score, maybe some other extracurricular activities. But they’re saying based on that, I kind of have an idea of whether you will do well here and then on in the working world.
ANYA KAMENETZ: Right.
Well, one of the most interesting kind of emerging factors in the realm of assessment is the idea that half or more of what we need for success is not determined by academic measures at all. It’s these noncognitive measures, right, grit, perseverance, right?
And these things actually can be — they can be assessed through surveys, low-stakes surveys. And the types of surveys that these organizations are doing, in fact, are quite predictive of people’s success later on in life, even more so than GPA alone.


学校が標準テストでスコアを上げるためだけの場になってしまっている現状批判はこれまでにも数多く出版されています。どの国でもこういう問題は抱えているようです。日本でもTOEICやTOEFLが導入されたら、このような本が多く出るのでしょうね。

Don’t Teach to the Test
Journalist Ron Berler explains how standardized testing is preventing students from learning.

By Brooke Berger
April 11, 2013 | 10:30 a.m. EDT

What is the effect of excessive testing on elementary-school curriculums?
From September until Christmas vacation, [Brookside] was like any school you would imagine. Then, once they got back from Christmas break, for the next nine weeks until testing began, it was a different animal. What they did was drop their curriculum, drop their texts, and instead study exclusively from a standardized-test prep book. Kids weren't getting a liberal arts education, but prepping to a very narrowly drawn standardized test in primarily language arts and math. Because they were interested in passing the test more than anything else, for that 22 percent of the school year, they taught primarily to the broad middle section of kids that were going to pass. Plus, the school went and reached out to those kids who they thought were on the cusp of possibly passing. So who gets left out? The kids at the bottom and the kids at the top.




もちろんこれらは忘れてはならないとても重要な話ですが、今回の件でYutaが個人的に興味深く感じたのは、e-learningが発達することで定期テストが不要になるとピアソンやETSも考えているというI talked to chief research scientist at Pearson and ETS who said you know, we believe that this invisible integrated assessment is really the future because stopping and testing is this clunky kind of a way of going about it.ところです。現在のテストをstopping and testingと表現しているところが面白いですね。


The Past, Present And Future Of High-Stakes Testing
JANUARY 22, 2015 3:39 AM ET

INSKEEP: So now, Anya, you're talking about something that will remind people of what Google does with your search data or Facebook might do with information that it gathers on you. It's just quietly gathering information about you and acting accordingly, and you never even know the information is being gathered about you.
KAMENETZ: Well, exactly. So on an individual basis every single day, more and more students in schools are using software to learn. And while the software is, you know, giving them the math problems or the English problems to answer, it's getting incredibly fine-grained information about the students' performances, how they think, how they approach difficult problems. Do they try really hard? Do they give up easily? And many people who, you know, run testing companies and software companies believe that that kind of information could replace the activity of stopping and testing.
INSKEEP: Wait, even the people who are making money creating the tests think there might be a better way to measure school performance than their own tests?
KAMENETZ: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I talked to chief research scientist at Pearson and ETS who said you know, we believe that this invisible integrated assessment is really the future because stopping and testing is this clunky kind of a way of going about it.
Businesses in the 1970s used to have to shut down at the end of the year and do inventory for three weeks. And that's kind of how we do it in schools today. We spend eight days taking tests. And so how could schools possibly use data in that same sort of agile, just-in-time way?


最近、iPhoneに標準装備されていたヘルスケアのアプリを見てビックリしたのですが、歩数や上った階数などがデータとしてすでに集計されているのですね。(今頃の話ですみません。。。)同じように教育ソフトウェアで学習するのが普通になると、日頃の集計データで成績は測定できるようになるので、現在のTOEICのようなstopping and testingは不要になるというのです。このヘルスケアアプリを考えると、遠い将来の話ではないと感じてしまいました。

標準テストに代わるものにどういう評価方法があるのか詳しく説明している記事もあるので、興味のある方はNPRの記事がオススメです。
 

Red meat for the red states

 

American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military HistoryAmerican Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History
(2012/01/03)
Chris Kyle、Scott McEwen 他

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映画『アメリカンスナイパー』の興行成績が好調のようで、いろいろな意味で話題になっているようです。そのあたりを今週のTIMEは取り上げていました。洋書の方は読みやすいので、映画公開まで我慢できない方は是非。自分は海兵隊とNavy Sealの違いもよくわからなかったのですが(汗)、奥さんのコメントがいたるところに登場しているので、映画では奥さんの協力が不可欠だった理由がわかりました。
また、本を読んでいれば、共和党支持者の多い地域で受けるだろうとRed meat for the red statesとした部分が理解しやすくなると思います。映画boyhoodでも、お父さんが熱心なキリスト教徒で、銃を子供にプレゼントするような親を持つ女性と再婚するシーンが出てきますね。

ENTERTAINMENT
American Sniper’s Chances Rise in the Oscar Race

Richard Corliss Jan. 22, 2015

Drawing huge audiences from both coastal cities and the heartland, Sniper can be seen as red meat for the red states. This stirred prominent movie-doc leftie Michael Moore to tweet his disapproval of Kyle’s job. “My uncle killed by sniper in WW2,” Moore wrote. “We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot u in the back. Snipers aren’t heroes. And invaders r worse. … But if you’re on the roof of your home defending it from invaders who’ve come 7K miles, you are not a sniper, u are brave, u are a neighbor.” Translation: Hail to the Iraqi insurgent snipers, boo to American Sniper.

Moore then disingenuously claimed he hadn’t been referring to the movie. But he had fired the first shot in a Twitter war that brought Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin to the film’s defense. If Sniper took a step toward the Oscars with its mammoth opening, it took two steps back in its adoption by Fox News.


Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



TIMEの記事は定期購読者限定かもしれませんので、同じようなNPRの記事を紹介しておきます。主人公のKyleの素行を問題視する部分です。映画ではまったく取り上げていないようで、批判を招いているようです。

'American Sniper' Exposes Unresolved Issues About The Iraq War
JANUARY 23, 2015 4:13 PM ET

Another reason for the backlash against American Sniper is the fantastical stories Kyle told about himself after he left the Navy. He said he killed two men who tried to carjack him in Texas. He said he went to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and shot people from the roof of the Superdome. On the radio Opie & Anthony Show, he claimed to have punched former Minnesota governor (and Navy veteran) Jesse Ventura at a bar after Ventura supposedly made disparaging remarks about soldiers.

It never happened, and Ventura won a defamation suit against Kyle. The other stories have also never been proved. Actor and producer Bradley Cooper has said that American Sniper is a "character study," but there's no mention of this part of Kyle's character in the movie.




日本でも中東の戦争が他人事ではなくなっていますので、この映画への関心は高くなるかもしれません。ブラッドリークーパーの米軍兵士へのメッセージです。


 

(続)ザ・オーディエンスはオススメです

 


ザ・オーディエンスは好評のようで「サラの鍵」のKristin Scott Thomasのバージョンが5月に上演されるようです。一方で、ヘレンミレンは来月からブロードウェイ上演を予定しています。

Kristin Scott Thomas to star as the Queen in return of The Audience
New version of Peter Morgan’s play to open in London as Helen Mirren, lauded for portrayal of Elizabeth II, stars in Broadway run
Frances Perraudin
Friday 31 October 2014 13.22 GMT

Kristin Scott Thomas will play the role of the Queen in a new version of Peter Morgan’s West End hit The Audience next year.

The role was originally played by Helen Mirren at the Gielgud Theatre in 2013 and won her an Olivier award for best actress. Scott Thomas’s version will open at the Apollo theatre on 5 May 2015, while Mirren stars in the role on Broadway.

Kristin Scott Thomas is receiving enthusiastic reviews for her performance in the Sophocles tragedy Electra at the Old Vic. Her career across stage and screen has spanned three decades, with memorable roles in Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral and Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient.


ブロードウェイ上演ではMorgan is apparently contemplating adding Tony Blair, who didn’t feature in London, to the New York line-up.とTony Blairを付け足される可能性があるようです。

Oscar Winner Helen Mirren Will Star in Peter Morgan's The Audience on Broadway in 2015
NEWS By Imogen Lloyd Webber July 10, 2014 - 5:56PM

Her Majesty is coming to Broadway! As previously speculated, Oscar winner Helen Mirren, who reprised the role of Queen Elizabeth II in the acclaimed 2013 West End production of The Audience, will star in a New York mounting of Peter Morgan's new play. The Daily Mail reports that Mirren has confirmed that she will begin rehearsals in mid-January next year, with the show starting previews in February. The drama will officially open at a Shubert theater to be confirmed in March.

The Audience follows the reign of Queen Elizabeth II from 1952 to the Diamond Jubilee in 2012. For 50 years the Queen has sat with all of England’s Prime Ministers for private, weekly meetings at Buckingham Palace. The Audience breaks the silence on these highly secretive meetings. Morgan is apparently contemplating adding Tony Blair, who didn’t feature in London, to the New York line-up.


TOEIC的には以下のような劇場チケット情報の表現を押さえておきたいですね。劇の合間の休憩はintermissionなんですね。

The Audience Quick Facts
Running Time:
2 hours and 15 minutes, including one intermission

Price Range
$75.00 - $152.00 (Ticket prices include a $2.00 Facility Fee.)
See this week's prices

Audience :
Children under the age of 4 are not permitted in the theatre.

First Preview Date Opening Date On Sale Through
February 17, 2015 March 8, 2015 June 28, 2015

Box Office Hours
Monday - Saturday: 10am - 8pm
Sunday: Noon - 6pm

Coat Room
Yes - no strollers or furs.




脚本を担当しているPeter Morganは映画「Queen」や「Frost/Nixon」でも知られています。どうりで面白かったわけです。

彼のインタビューがありました。先の記事でFor 50 years the Queen has sat with all of England’s Prime Ministers for private, weekly meetings at Buckingham Palace.とあるようにprivateのため公式記録は残っておらず、このやり取りは彼が取材を元に想像で描いたもののようです。

‘Rush’, ‘The Audience’ Author Peter Morgan On Truth In Storytelling: Conversations With Jeremy Gerard
by Jeremy Gerard

January 23, 2015 8:57am

JEREMY GERARD: Let’s talk about The Audience, in which real people — Helen Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth and the various Prime Ministers — had real conversations which you know absolutely nothing about.

PETER MORGAN: These meetings that the Queen has with her Prime Minister every week, everybody knows they happen and nobody knows what’s said. I thought, Great, and then you’ve got to piece it together — well, I know that this Prime Minister at this point in his term was feeling this and if I were to set The Audience at that point, it’s reasonable to assume he would be euphoric or defeated or crushed or paranoid. And then, Well, I know what she was doing in her life then and, Oh, that’s an interesting intersect. Stephen Daldry sort of weaved it together.

JEREMY GERARD: How does it feel to pry open the conscience of the Queen?
PETER MORGAN: Oh, God I have no idea! I don’t know if she’s anything like the version of her that I write. She’s so unknowable. I’m only guessing.


テレビドラマとしてThe Crownを準備しているとも語っています。

JEREMY GERARD: Will you adapt The Audience for film?
PETER MORGAN: No. But I’m creating a big television show, The Crown, which was inspired by it, for Netflix. We start shooting this year and I’ve written the first 10 episodes. It’s the story of the two houses, Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, and the intersection between the two through this weekly meeting. But in essence, it’s about that family of hers, starting in 1947 on the eve of her wedding. At the heart of it I suppose it’s a story of marriage. and how difficult it must be to be a young woman and how much of you is the Queen and how much of you is Elizabeth Windsor and to what degree do the two things blend and blur into one another?
JEREMY GERARD: There’s that fog you like so much. “A truth like fiction…”
PETER MORGAN: And that is so pertinent to the area that I find myself working in. I’m constantly having to check my conscience about what I’m writing and the responsibility of what I’m saying.


女王のPrivateな会見を題材したことについて、Telegraphのレビューでは昔だったら打ち首ものだとちゃかして始めていました。このレビューは5つ星と高い評価をしています。

The Audience, Gielgud Theatre, review
Helen Mirren gives a magnificent performance as the Queen in Peter Morgan's marvellous play The Audience at the Gielgud Theatre, says Charles Spencer.

By Charles Spencer6:00
AM GMT 06 Mar 2013

What a great if faintly guilty pleasure this play proves. In times past, the dramatist Peter Morgan would have been locked up in the tower for such impudent lese-majesty, and might have counted himself lucky to have kept his head on his shoulders.

But as he showed in his screenplay for The Queen about the crisis that engulfed the Royal Family following the death of Princess Diana, Morgan admires his monarch. And in this marvellous piece, with Helen Mirren once again giving a magnificent performance as the Queen, he penetrates at least some her mystery, with compassion, grace, affection and humour.


女王はどんな政権の首相も支持することになっていますが、そこは生身の人間。好き嫌いがどうしても出てしまいます。この劇を見れば、誰がお気に入りで、誰が嫌いだったのかわかるようになっています。(といっても、あくまで脚本家によるものですが。。。)
 

ザ・オーディエンスはオススメです

 




英国演劇を上映してくれるNational Theatre Live。昨年見逃したザ・オーディエンスを観てきましたがとても楽しめました。英国の歴史にまったく興味がないと厳しいかもしれませんが、オススメです。1月28日までなので興味がある方は是非。

ザ・オーディエンスThe Audience
上映時間:2時間38分/演出:スティーヴン・ダルドリー/作:ピーター・モーガン/ 出演:ヘレン・ミレン、ジェフリー・ビーヴァーズ、ジョナサン・クート
映画「クィーン」でアカデミー賞主演女優賞を受賞したヘレン・ミレンが、再びエリザベス2世に扮した話題作。 1952年の即位以来、女王が毎週行っている英国首相たちとの謁見の模様を描く。2015年3月にはNYブロードウェイでも開幕。 同作を基にしたドラマシリーズも製作中という、演劇・映画ファン必見の舞台だ。


この作品でのaudienceの意味は、国王との正式会見・謁見です。動画の予告編ではEvery Tuesday at approximately 6:30 pm the queen of the United Kingdom has a Private audience with her prime minister.と説明してくれていますね。

辞書でも最後の方にこの意味を載せています。なぜかほとんどがPopeとの謁見を例文に選んでいました。QueenはCOBUILDだけでした。

(ロングマン)
audience
[countable] a formal meeting with a very important person
audience with
He was granted an audience with the Pope.


(COBUILD)
audience
5. countable noun [usu sing]
If you have an audience with someone important, you have a formal meeting with them.
⇒ [+ with] The Prime Minister will seek an audience with the Queen later this morning.


Audienceと聞けば観客を連想するのが普通でしょうから、そのあたりは以下の記事ではキャッチとしてIt is called The Audience - and the West End play has broken an audience record.と始めていました。とても好評だったようです。

Helen Mirren in The Audience breaks audience record as 110,000 people watch in cinemas
CATHERINE WYLIE
Tuesday 18 June 2013

It is called The Audience - and the West End play has broken an audience record.

A live broadcast of Helen Mirren starring as the Queen in The Audience has attracted the largest audience so far for National Theatre Live (NT Live), which broadcasts stage shows from England to cinema screens worldwide.

Peter Morgan's play, performed at London's Gielgud Theatre, was seen by nearly 80,000 people in the UK and 30,000 people in North America on June 13 - a record for the four-year-old programme.


BBCでのインタビューです。若い頃Helen Mirrenは王国不要の立場だったようですね。日本でそのような立場を表明した芸能人が一線に立てないですから状況が違うのですね。



Helen Mirren says she used YouTube to prepare for Queen role
Dame Helen Mirren has revealed that she used YouTube to prepare for her role as the Queen.

By John-Paul Ford Rojas
11:01AM GMT 05 Mar 2013

The actress said the new play was a “very, very different challenge” to the film, as it was “as much about the history of Britain as it is about the history of the Queen”.

Dame Helen, whose views have softened after being a republican in her youth, said she was now a “constitutional monarchist” though she added: “I don’t know that the scale of the monarchy in Britain will survive, the monumental scale of it.”
 

Stop Reporting or We’ll Kill Your Family

 
「表現の自由を守れ」と口で言うのは簡単ですが、面倒くさい人の意見を聞かなければいけないのは不快でしかありません。その不快さに耐える覚悟がないと「表現の自由を守れ」というのは単に自分の言いたいことだけを主張する権利を訴えているだけです。といっても、自分にその覚悟があると言われると即答できないです。。。

今週のEconomistは表現の自由を取り上げていました。これはローマ法王「表現の自由には限度」が一因としてあるようで、blasphemyにも触れています。確かに自分の心情としては、この感想に近いものがあります。。。

"If my good friend Dr. Gasbarri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch," Francis said half-jokingly, throwing a mock punch his way. "It's normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others."

Economistはもちろん限度を認めていますが、表現の自由は絶対的に認められるべきだとという立場で社説を書いています。

社説の始まりは、自国では弾圧的な立場の指導者がパリのデモに檀家していることをit was a pageant more of hypocrisy than of principle.と指摘するところから始めています。本当に、この指導者たちにテロ弾圧の口実を与えてしまった感じです。

Freedom of speech
First—and last—do no harm

Speech should be freer than it is in many Western countries
Jan 24th 2015 | From the print edition
THE march in Paris after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo was supposed to display international solidarity over the right of free expression. In retrospect, it was a pageant more of hypocrisy than of principle. The Russian foreign minister’s attendance did not stop two of his countrymen being prosecuted in Moscow for holding Je Suis Charlie placards. His Saudi Arabian counterpart apparently saw no contradiction between the parade and the public flogging of a blogger in Jeddah two days before. Turkey is a champion locker-up of journalists, but its shameless prime minister turned up all the same. Meanwhile, somewhat misconstruing the point, in the name of modesty an Israeli ultra-Orthodox publication photoshopped the female leaders from its coverage.

Terrorism was the main issue in the Paris attacks, which targeted a kosher shop as well as a magazine. But the subsidiary row they ignited—about the parameters of free speech—has been stoked rather than soothed by their aftermath, and continues to roil the world (see article). The Economist believes the right to free speech should be almost absolute.


また、世界の表現の自由についての現状をまとめた記事も勉強になります。

Freedom of speech
The sound of silence

Reactions to the Paris attacks highlight threats to free expression around the world
Jan 24th 2015 | AMSTERDAM, ISLAMABAD, LAGOS, NAIROBI AND PARIS | From the print edition

日本にいるYutaはCharile Hebdoはちょっとやり過ぎで表現の自由の乱用ではないかと思ってしまいます。でも、まず原則として表現の自由、報道の自由は絶対に遵守しなければいけない、この基本的なことが根底にないといけない。そんなことをアフガニスタンの報道の状況を伝えるForeign Policyの記事で感じました。

Publish and Perish in Afghanistan
The Taliban is targeting journalists as part of an ongoing insurgency against the government. But militants are not the only threat to media freedom in Afghanistan.
BY PHELIM KINE
Phelim Kine is deputy director in the Asia division at New York-base
Human Rights Watch.
JANUARY 23, 2015

KABUL — There are no walk-ins at the Kabul office of the Afghan Journalists Safety Committee. Visitors to the media advocacy group are screened through a slit in a heavy iron door, submit their belongings to careful inspection, and undergo a pat-down body-search for concealed weapons or suicide vests under the steely gaze of an assault rifle-wielding guard. The new security measures are a response to a warning issued by the Taliban in December that it would specifically target journalists and nongovernmental organizations as part of its ongoing insurgency against the Afghan government.

That’s no empty threat. Insurgent attacks, including suicide bombings, killed a total of eight journalists, including two foreign correspondents, in 2014, an increase from three such killings in 2013. And the body count continues to rise. On January 16, radio journalist Mohammad Aqil Wiqar became the first journalist to be killed in 2015 when two unidentified men with AK-47 assault rifles shot him at close range at a wedding celebration in eastern Nangarhar province. Police have not arrested any suspects and there have been no claims of responsibility for Wiqar’s killing.

But Afghan journalists have more to fear than attacks by Taliban insurgents. A Human Rights Watch report this week documents how reporters and media outlets are also increasingly subject to harassment, threats, and violence from government officials, Afghan security forces, and pro-government warlords. Their targets are journalists whose reporting exposes official links to issues including land grabbing, corruption, and human rights abuses.


権力に都合の悪い記事を書くと、Charlie Hebdoのように襲撃を受けてしまうので、自己検閲をかけてしまうようです。

Confronted by a corrosive combination of intimidation, violence, and government complicity with such abuses, Afghan journalists are resorting to self-censorship to protect themselves. Well aware of their government’s willingness to turn a blind eye to abuses against them, or worse, to side with the perpetrators, journalists now must weigh the personal risks of covering issues that might incur violent reprisals. A Kabul-based senior newspaper editor told Human Rights Watch that reporting on certain politically connected mujahidin warlords — veterans of the conflicts against both the Soviet occupation and the Taliban — were effectively off limits for his reporters. “We censor ourselves for the security of our staff. These people don’t file a complaint — they might kill us.”

このForeign Policyの記事は人権団体のHuman Rights Watchが発表した報告書の紹介記事で、この報告書自体はHuman Rights Watchのサイトで全文が読めます。プレスリリースの最初が以下です。



Afghanistan: Media Under Attack
Violence, Intimidation Against Journalists From All Sides

JANUARY 21, 2015

(Kabul) – Violence and threats against Afghanistan’s journalists by the government and security forces are increasing, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These attacks put at risk the gains in media freedom in Afghanistan since 2001.

The 48-page report, “‘Stop Reporting or We’ll Kill Your Family’: Threats to Media Freedom in Afghanistan,” documents harassment, intimidation, and attacks on journalists and the Afghan government’s failure to investigate and prosecute those responsible. The failure to protect journalistic freedom has emboldened those determined to suppress criticism of the government, the security forces, and other powerful entities in Afghan society. The Taliban insurgency has greatly contributed to the climate of fear by explicitly targeting journalists for reporting deemed unfavorable. The government should act decisively to end the violence and intimidation, and the Taliban should end its attacks on civilian organizations, including the media.


こういう状況を考えると、まず表現の自由、報道の自由を絶対の権利として認めないといけないと思います。

長くなってしまいますが、Publish and Perish in Afghanistanという記事タイトルは、学界で言われることのあるPublish or perishからきているのでしょう。アフガニスタンの状況は、記事を発表しても、命を危険にさらすことを指してることを”and”で示しているようです。

(Wikipedia)
Publish or perish
"Publish or perish" is a phrase coined to describe the pressure in academia in the United States to rapidly and continually publish academic work to sustain or further one's career.[1][2][3]

Frequent publication is one of the few methods at scholars' disposal to demonstrate academic talent. Successful publications bring attention to scholars and their sponsoring institutions, which can facilitate continued funding and an individual's progress through a chosen field. In popular academic perception, scholars who publish infrequently, or who focus on activities that do not result in publications, such as instructing undergraduates, may lose ground in competition for available tenure-track positions.[citation needed] The pressure to publish has been cited as a cause of poor work being submitted to academic journals.[4]


Publish or perishはあまりいい文脈で使われないようで、以下の記事なんかも粗製濫造になっている状況を批判的に紹介しています。

Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science
Pressure on scientists to publish has led to a situation where any paper, however bad, can now be printed in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed
David Colquhoun
Monday 5 September 2011 13.59 BST

Peer review is the process that decides whether your work gets published in an academic journal. It doesn't work very well any more, mainly as a result of the enormous number of papers that are being published (an estimated 1.3 million papers in 23,750 journals in 2006). There simply aren't enough competent people to do the job. The overwhelming effect of the huge (and unpaid) effort that is put into reviewing papers is to maintain a status hierarchy of journals. Any paper, however bad, can now get published in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed.

The blame for this sad situation lies with the people who have imposed a publish-or-perish culture, namely research funders and senior people in universities. To have "written" 800 papers is regarded as something to boast about rather than being rather shameful. University PR departments encourage exaggerated claims, and hard-pressed authors go along with them.

 

Zero to Oneはdisruptionに反対

 

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureZero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
(2014/09/16)
Peter Thiel、Blake Masters 他

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Zero to Oneを図書館から借りて読み始めてみました。ゼロから生み出すことの難しさを語ることは素晴らしいと思うのですが、Googleが突然ゼロからすごいことを始めたというのはちょっと違和感を感じてしまします。当時検索サイトはすでにいくつかありましたらねえ。単なる都合の悪いことを捨象した自画自賛本になっていないか気をつけて読みたいと思います。

このブログでdisruptorについて取り上げましたが、この著者はDisruptionをdisruption has recently transmogrified into a self‐congratulatory buzzword for anything posing as trendy and new.と批判的に捉えています。確かに自分がStart-up企業だったら気をつけて行動した方がよさそうですね。

Don’t disrupt
Silicon Valley has become obsessed with “disruption.” Originally, “disruption” was a term of art to describe how a firm can use new technology to introduce a low‐end product at low prices, improve the product over time, and eventually overtake even the premium products offered by incumbent companies using older technology. This is roughly what happened when the advent of PCs disrupted the market for mainframe computers: at first PCs seemed irrelevant, then they became dominant. Today mobile devices may be doing the same thing to PCs.

However, disruption has recently transmogrified into a self‐congratulatory buzzword for anything posing as trendy and new. This seemingly trivial fad matters because it dis‐ torts an entrepreneur’s self‐understanding in an inherently competitive way. The concept was coined to describe threats to incumbent companies, so startups’ obsession with disruption means they see themselves through older firms’ eyes. If you think of yourself as an insurgent battling dark forces, it’s easy to become unduly fixated on the obstacles in your path. But if you truly want to make something new, the act of creation is far more important than the old industries that might not like what you create. Indeed, if your company can be summed up by its opposition to already existing firms, it can’t be completely new and it’s probably not going to be‐ come a monopoly.


適度に教養的なことを混ぜているのも人気が出ている要因の一つでしょうか。例えば、3章のタイトル All Happy Companies Are Differentなんかはすぐにトルストイを意識しているとわかりますね。

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina


それに以下のハムレットなんかも引用していました。日本語は河合先生の本からです。

Act 4 Scene 4
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake.

儚き命も将来も、運命と死の危険に
曝そうとしているのだ。それも
卵の殻ほどの問題のために! 真の偉大さとは、
大義がなければ微動だにしないが、
名誉が関わるとなれば、たとえ藁しべ一本のためにも、
命をかけて立ち上がることだ。


といっても批判的に取り上げています。。。

For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter. This twisted logic is part of human nature, but it’s disastrous in business. If you can recognize competition as a destructive force instead of a sign of value, you’re already more sane than most.

ビジネス書はとっても読みやすいですから、こういうのから入るのはオススメです。
 

情報収集としての英語

 
英語学習界隈では、資格学習やアウトプット学習に重点を置かれがちです。しかし、英語ができるアドバンテージの一つに日本語では得られない情報をたくさん得られるということも忘れてはいけないでしょう。特に仕事で英語を活かしたい人にとってはこちらの重要性は無視できません。TIMEやEconomistを読むメリットの一つも日本のメディアでは得られない情報が得られることです。

とまあ、仰々しく始めたのですが、今週のTIMEで河原温さんの回顧展がニューヨークのグッゲンハイム美術館で開かれることを知りました。昨年お亡くなりになったことを受けてのことでしょうか。



February 6–May 3, 2015
Through radically restricted means, On Kawara’s work engages the personal and historical consciousness of place and time. Kawara’s practice is often associated with the rise of Conceptual art, yet in its complex wit and philosophical reach, it stands well apart.

Organized with the cooperation of the artist, On Kawara—Silence will be the first full representation of Kawara’s output, beginning in 1964 and including every category of work, much of it produced during his travels across the globe: date paintings (the Today series); postcards (the I Got Up series); telegrams (the I Am Still Alive series); maps (the I Went series); lists of names (the I Met series); newspaper cuttings (the I Read series); the inventory of paintings (Journals); and calendars (One Hundred Years and One Million Years). The exhibition will also present numerous drawings produced in Paris in 1964, which are fascinating proposals for unrealized works; and Kawara’s only two extant paintings of 1965, Location and Title, which herald the Today series. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Guggenheim will organize a continuous live reading of the artist’s One Million Years, the steady recitation of numbers from a vast ledger, which will be performed on the ground floor of the Guggenheim rotunda.


恥ずかしながらほとんど知らなかったのですが、ワシントンポストもニューヨークタイムズもObituaryでは大きく扱っていたようです。

河原温氏、日本を代表するコンセプチュアル・アートの美術家が81歳で死去
Author Information
The Huffington Post | 執筆者: Mallika Rao
投稿日: 2014年07月11日 13時06分 JST

On Kawara, Artist Who Found Elegance in Every Day, Dies at 81
By ROBERTA SMITHJULY 15, 2014
 

Man of words Man of deeds

 


Oprah Winfrey and fellow actors from the movie "Selma" marched with hundreds Sunday ahead of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, recalling one of the bloodiest chapters of the civil rights struggle.

ルーサーキングの誕生日にセルマで行進があったとあります。今年は50周年でもあり、映画セルマも公開されたことで特に注目を集めているようです。

映画でキング役を務めたDavid Oyelowoのスピーチです。There’s a big difference between talking and doingで始まります。



(英辞郎)
A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.
口先だけで実行が伴わない者は雑草だらけの庭のようなものだ。


普通man of wordsは悪い意味に捉えがちですが、Dr. King was a man of words but he was a man of deeds as well.とスピーチしています。彼の演説の素晴らしさをman of wordsとしているのかもしれません。
 

Global culture to fight extremism

 


同じくFresh Airを聞いていたらMaajid Nawazという方が登場していました。急進的なイスラム主義者から穏健派に転向したようで、これまでの経歴を赤裸々に語ってくれています。

How Orwell's 'Animal Farm' Led A Radical Muslim To Moderation
JANUARY 15, 2015 2:05 PM ET

When Maajid Nawaz was growing up in Essex, England, in the 1990s, the son of Pakistani parents, he first found his voice of rebellion through American hip-hop.
"It gave me a feeling that my identity could matter — and did matter — growing up as a British Pakistani who was facing racism from whiter society," Nawaz tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "but also confusion about where my family was from and not really fitting into either culture."

At age 16, Nawaz was transformed from a disaffected British teenager to an Islamist recruiter when he joined the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Nawaz continued his college studies and spent a year abroad in Egypt, where he continued his recruiting. As a result, he was imprisoned for four years, starting in 2002.

It was while in prison, surrounded by several prominent jihadist leaders, that Nawaz realized he wanted to take a different path. He was reading George Orwell's Animal Farm and came to a new understanding of "what happens when somebody tries to create a utopia."


パリの事件を受けて、BBCやCNNのアンダーソンクーパーなどに頻繁に登場しているようです。このままだと極右とイスラム原理主義の両極が空白を埋めてしまうことになるという危機感は大変共感できるものです。



2011年にはTEDで話をしていたのですね。



今回の件で表現の自由はどうあるべきか、BBCで盛んに話し合っていることを知りませんでした。。。。





 

Patricia Arquetteがノミネート

 


映画BoyhoodでPatricia Arquetteが助演女優賞にノミネートされていました。失礼ながらTrue Romanceに出ていたハリウッド女優だったとはBoyhoodの映画を見たときには全く気付きませんでした。



まあ20年前のことですから仕方がないのかもしれません。。。メグライアンやレニー ゼルウィガーなどのことを考えると彼女の方が健全なのかもしれません。このあたりのこともラジオのFresh Airで語っていました。



On aging in the film and as an actress in Hollywood
Arquette: As an actress, for me, I think there's such a pressure in the world for women to look a certain way, especially if you have success at a certain moment in your life in the ingenue age group — that you're supposed to hold onto that. And I really wanted to move away from that status as quickly as possible.

It's true for human beings that a lot of the story of life is the mating story, is the falling in love story, is the having children story; so it does make sense that a large percentage of the stories are told in that age group, I think. But Hollywood tells the actresses what they need to look like to continue working, and I don't believe that of human beings. I don't believe that's true of many stories, and I do think as an actress it gives you a very short shelf life if you buy into that. ...

If you look at paintings throughout history of female beauty, the one that we're creating right now is a really weird one.

Boyhoodがどこまで賞をとれるか楽しみですね。
 

金のフレーズの威力

 
雑誌Foreign Policyがデザインを一新したようです。

FOREIGN POLICY LAUNCHES A BOLD REDESIGN WITH JANUARY/FEBRUARY ISSUE

January 16, 2014 — WASHINGTON, D.C. — A stark, wordless, black and white cover heralds the bold redesign of Foreign Policy magazine, the publication’s first cover-to-cover makeover since it became a glossy in 2000. The new look is the result of months of intense collaboration among editors and designers. The January/February 2015 issue’s cover image, a wilting, bleeding earth, stunningly foretells the timely theme of the long-form stories inside: climate change.

The FP Group’s CEO and Editor David Rothkopf noted in a letter to readers, “We’re confident that you will find the new FP to be both fresher and more engaging than it has ever been; and we are certain that, as you explore the magazine, you will be struck by the intelligent, fresh, and rule-breaking graphic design.” Rothkopf said the magazine’s key mandate remains “To provide perspectives on important global trends that are available nowhere else and ensure that each issue covers technology, economics, national security, energy, and overlooked cultural issues.”


これより先に編集・デザインチームに新戦力が加入したことを発表していました。雑誌WiredのアートディレクターであるJosef Reyesがクリエイティブディレクターになるようです。

新規のチーム編成や新規加入者の告知はTOEICでも登場します。サイトで全文読めますので確認してみます。

FOREIGN POLICY ANNOUNCES FOUR NEW ADDITIONS TO THE EDITORIAL AND DESIGN STAFF TEAM

January 12, 2015 — Washington, DC — David Rothkopf, CEO and Editor of The FP Group, announced today that the editorial and design team for Foreign Policy will be growing once again. Joining the ranks are Josef Reyes as FP’s newest Creative Director; Sean D. Naylor as a Senior Reporter; Amanda Silverman as the Story Editor, Print; and Ilya Lozovsky as Assistant Editor for Democracy Lab.

Rothkopf said, “These latest hires, in addition to our recent announcement of Lara Jakes joining us from the AP as Deputy Managing Editor, News, are just the latest signs of both our growth and our commitment to bringing the very best talent to Foreign Policy. These are not separate ideas. Hiring great people is just the one best way we know to ensure we provide our readers with the kind of great coverage they have come to expect from us.”

Josef Reyes has been named FP’s new Creative Director, succeeding Lindsay Ballant, who is leaving to pursue personal creative projects. Reyes is currently Art Director at Wired, based in San Francisco. Previously he was the Deputy Art Director at New York magazine. He became involved in magazines at the New York Times, where he worked on the launch of Key, the newspaper’s real estate magazine. Josef has won awards from the Society of Publication Designers, D&AD and I.D. Magazine. In 2009 he was included in Print Magazine's annual New Visual Artists issue as one of the 20 best designers under 30 years old. He has a BFA in Graphic Design from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.


まずプレスリリースのタイトルFOREIGN POLICY ANNOUNCES FOUR NEW ADDITIONS TO THE EDITORIAL AND DESIGN STAFF TEAMを見ます。FOUR NEW ADDITIONSと4名のスタッフが新たに加入したことを伝えています。


新TOEIC TEST 出る単特急 金のフレーズ新TOEIC TEST 出る単特急 金のフレーズ
(2012/03/07)
TEX加藤

商品詳細を見る


TEX加藤さんの金のフレーズの見出し語はadditionalでhire additional staff(追加のスタッフを雇う)というフレーズを紹介しています。解説部分で動詞addなどと一緒にadditionが記載されていました。additive(添加物)があるのはパート5なんかで出題されたからでしょうか。。。

さすがTEXさんだと感心したのはaddition(追加、新戦力)と書いていたことです。こういう派生語の説明は辞書の受け売りで済ませてしまうのが多いんですよ。もし単に辞書的な説明でいいやと思えばaddition(追加分、追加されたもの[人])とでもしたと思うんです。

勝手な想像ですがTEXさんはそんな安易なことはせずこういう部分にもTOEICで使われる意味である「新戦力」を加えたのではないかと思いました。例えば、求職に関するreference letter(紹介状)で以下のように推薦しているものがありました。

I believe Frank would be an excellent addition to your library staff.

もちろん、人ではなくモノに対しても使われます。Our Friends in the Skyという本を図書館に勧めているところでは以下のようになっていました。

Our Friends in the Sky will be a valuable addition to your library.

第2パラグラフでは、four new additionsがthese latest hiresと表現されていました。recruitが「新入社員」を指すことを迷った受験者がいたようですが、additionやhireなどが人を指すことがあることは慣れておきたいですね。

These latest hires, in addition to our recent announcement of Lara Jakes joining us from the AP as Deputy Managing Editor, News, are just the latest signs of both our growth and our commitment to bringing the very best talent to Foreign Policy.

TOEICの出題頻度で言えば、additionはこの文にあるようなin addition toもしくは単にin additionが圧倒的に使われていたのでこちらをまず覚えるべきでしょうね。

additionが人を指すのはaddition of a new staff memberというような表現が念頭にあるからでしょう。これをもっとポジティブにan excellent additionとかa valuable additionの意味になる表現がassetでしょうか。こちらもモノではなく人を指すことがあります。

(ロングマン)
asset
[usually singular] something or someone that is useful because they help you succeed or deal with problems [≠ liability]:
A sense of humor is a great asset in this business.
be an asset to somebody/something
I think Rachel would be an asset to the department.


第3パラグラフ以降でfour new additionsの経歴を一人一人説明しています。どれもTOEIC的に慣れておきたい表現ばかりです。

Josef Reyes has been named FP’s new Creative Director, succeeding Lindsay Ballant, who is leaving to pursue personal creative projects. Reyes is currently Art Director at Wired, based in San Francisco. Previously he was the Deputy Art Director at New York magazine.

最初の文はname A(人) B(役職)のかたちが受動態で使われています。パート5が好きな人にはたまらないかもしれません(笑)。また「〜を引く継く」という意味で動詞succeedが使われています。

Josef Reyes has been named FP’s new Creative Director, succeeding Lindsay Ballant

また次の文以降でcurrentlyとpreviouslyという副詞を伴って現職と前職を紹介しています。

肝心のForeign Policyの方ですが、Wiredっぽいレイアウトになった感じでした。。。
 

Heroic messenger or adrenaline addict? Truth teller or vulture?

 


先週までの公開ということで金曜日に観てきました。「そんなに大事なの、写真が」という字幕の部分はI hope it was worth it, the picture.やはり文脈あってこその文意だと思います。報道写真家が主人公ということで、Charlie Hebdoの事件後に興味がわいたのです。



Why did you start taking pictures of War?
Anger.
Are you still angry?
Oh, yes.

You get on a plane, go to some god forsaken place. You come home. We are happy. But all the time you are just waiting for the next shot.

I hope it was worth it, the picture.

These kids can't live in constant fear that their mother's gonna die.

Trust me. It’s OK.
Rebecca.

I want you out of my house.

There are some things you can do nothing about. I started something that I cannot walk away from



仕事か家庭か、という普遍的な問いですが、世界を飛び回る紛争写真家の場合は問題がより深刻になるようです。

Movies
‘1,000 Times Good Night’ movie review: Keeping the family in focus

By Michael O'Sullivan October 23, 2014

At times, it seems as if the choice Rebecca faces is straightforward enough: She can be a good photographer or a good mother, but not both. As the film presents it, that agonizing if simplistic dilemma is made all the more terrible when Rebecca suddenly realizes — with stomach-churning clarity — that Steph, a budding photographer, is heading down a path that may one day cause her to pick up a camera herself and point it in harm’s way.

紛争写真家に関してHeroic messenger or adrenaline addict? Truth teller or vulture?という問いに対して、この映画は随分と突き放した終わり方をしていました。

Insatiably, She Leaps Into the Fray
‘1,000 Times Good Night,’ Starring Juliette Binoche

By STEPHEN HOLDENOCT. 23, 2014

Heroic messenger or adrenaline addict? Truth teller or vulture? In “1,000 Times Good Night,” Rebecca (Juliette Binoche), a celebrated, morally self-righteous war photographer hooked on risk-taking, leads two lives that are in continual conflict.

Between grueling assignments in which she faces death by venturing into the heart of the fray, camera in hand, Rebecca returns to a picture-perfect existence at her home on the Irish seacoast. She is married to Marcus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, from “Game of Thrones”), a dashing marine biologist who frets every time she departs for a war front. They have two daughters; the elder, Stephanie (Lauryn Canny), is a teenager and a precociously talented artist.

These glossily photographed domestic interludes resemble a high-end magazine spread in which the camera slavers over images of virtuous, beautiful people savoring the good life. You have the impression that, to a degree, Rebecca’s hazardous work is a form of atonement for good fortune that she feels she doesn’t deserve.


正直、この映画は以下の映画レビューのように退屈に感じていました。報道写真家の使命をかっこよく描こうとしていないかとも思ったからです。

'1,000 Times Good Night': Movie review
Despite the presence of Juliette Binoche as a top war photographer, gorgeous looking film never really goes anywhere

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Thursday, October 23, 2014, 12:00 PM

Day-to-day life is banal, and her experiences haunt her. Sadly, this gorgeous-looking adult movie plays out the same theme over and over, never going anywhere surprising. At least we have Binoche to guide us to hell and back.

紛争地の事態が全く好転しておらず、むしろ深刻化しているという絶望感。報道写真家に高尚な役割を付与するよりもずっと正直な描き方だと思いました。
 

クルーニーもSeize the dayを引用

 


日曜日のゴールデングローブ賞のスピーチでは占めのところのJe Suis Charlieが注目を集めました。

JE SUIS CHARLIE01.11.15
George Clooney’s Powerful Golden Globes Speech on His Love For Amal and Je Suis Charlie
2015 edition of the Golden Globes featured plenty of laughs, but also a beautiful lifetime achievement award speech by the one and only George Clooney.

“And one last thing: To reiterate what we’ve all been talking about, today was an extraordinary day,” said Clooney. “There were millions of people who marched not just in Paris, but around the world. And they were Christians and Jews and Muslims. They were leaders of countries all over the world. And they didn’t march in protest; they marched in support of the idea that we will not walk in fear. We won’t do it. So, Je Suis Charlie. Thank you.”

Youtubeでスピーチ全部を見たのですが、映画「今を生きる」でのCarpe Diemに触れている部分がありました。賞ではなく、作品こそが人々の記憶に残ると訴えている部分です。

“For the record: If you are in this room, you’ve caught the brass ring,” said Clooney. “You get to do what you’ve always dreamed to do and be celebrated for it, and that just... it ain’t losing. I don’t remember what awards Lauren Bacall won. I just remember her saying, ‘You know how to whistle, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.’ And I have no idea what kind of hardware Robin Williams took home. But I sure remember “carpe diem” and, ‘Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.’ I never forget that.”



まあちょっと強引でありますが、Carpe Diemに反応してしまったのは今週のEconomistの表紙と社説がまさにSeize the dayだっからです。エネルギーの現状と最新動向をSpecial report: Energy and technologyで取り上げているからのようですが、補助金行政からの脱却を社説で求めてます。ここでは現在の原油安というチャンスを生かすことをSeize the dayというフレーズに込めているようです。

Energy
Seize the day
The fall in the price of oil and gas provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix bad energy policies

Jan 17th 2015 | From the print edition

The most straightforward piece of reform, pretty much everywhere, is simply to remove all the subsidies for producing or consuming fossil fuels. Last year governments around the world threw $550 billion down that rathole—on everything from holding down the price of petrol in poor countries to encouraging companies to search for oil. By one count, such handouts led to extra consumption that was responsible for 36% of global carbon emissions in 1980-2010.

Falling prices provide an opportunity to rethink this nonsense. Cash-strapped developing countries such as India and Indonesia have bravely begun to cut fuel subsidies, freeing up money to spend on hospitals and schools (see article). But the big oil exporters in the poor world, which tend to be the most egregious subsidisers of domestic fuel prices, have not followed their lead. Venezuela is close to default, yet petrol still costs a few cents a litre in Caracas. And rich countries still underwrite the production of oil and gas. Why should American taxpayers pay for Exxon to find hydrocarbons? All these subsidies should be binned.


下記の記事は世界のエネルギー事情をざっくり理解できます。

Energy and technology
Let there be light

Thanks to better technology and improved efficiency, energy is becoming cleaner and more plentiful—whatever the price of oil, says Edward Lucas
Jan 17th 2015 | From the print edition

今週はこのエネルギー特集以外にもCharlie Hebdo問題も大きく取り上げていますので、「買い」の号ではないかと思います。
 

Lack of diversity?

 

今年のアカデミー賞ノミネート作品。主演男優賞も主演女優賞も白人だったことが議論を呼んでいるようです。WSJもNews Hourも取り上げています。アカデミー会員が白人で男性が大勢を占めていることが一因のようです。

Oscar Nominations Stir Up Controversy for Lack of Diversity
‘Boyhood,’ ‘Birdman’ and ‘Budapest’ rack up nominations while ‘Selma’ is overlooked in key categories.

By BEN FRITZ
Updated Jan. 16, 2015 3:34 p.m. ET

Many in Hollywood and on social media were struck by the lack of racial or ethnic diversity among the Oscar nominees. Though there were, in fact, very few contenders that featured diverse casts, “Selma” star David Oyelowo, who played Martin Luther King, Jr., and the movie’s director, Ava DuVernay, were both snubbed despite the film’s best-picture nomination. That means that the Academy Awards are without a person of color or a Hispanic nominated in the acting categories for the first time since 1999.

The Oscars are often a focal point for complaints about diversity in the movie industry, which studies have found remains less racially diverse on-screen and behind-the-scenes than the nation as a whole. Exacerbating that is the fact that 94% of the Academy’s 6,000-plus voting members were white as of 2012, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation.

Since then, the Academy appears to have made efforts to diversify its membership, inviting Chris Rock, Rosario Dawson and Kerry Washington, among others, to join. Cheryl Boone Isaacs, an African-American marketing executive, has been president of the Academy since 2013.




SelmaについてはLBJ大統領の役割が正確に描かれていないと批判を浴びていますが、これに関してベナフレックが関わった「アルゴ」は正確でない部分もあったのに受賞しているではないかと反論しています。

How the Oscars’ lack of diversity reflects who runs Hollywood
January 15, 2015 at 6:25 PM EST
For the first time in 20 years, all of the Academy Award nominees for leading and supporting acting roles are white. Gwen Ifill asks Mike Sargent of Pacifica Radio and Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post about the surprises and snubs of the 2015 Oscar nominations, and what it says about power and diversity in Hollywood.

GWEN IFILL: Mike Sargent, a lot of the debate about “Selma” in particular was about its accuracy, about its historical fidelity. Do you think that hurt it?
MIKE SARGENT: Well, I think it definitely hurt it. And I also feel it is kind of a load of malarkey.
I mean, let’s face it. Historical films and a number of the films nominated are historical films based on real people. Historical films in general always have a certain amount of elements that are not specifically historically accurate.
And I won’t — whether disagreeing or not agreeing, that campaign effectively allows the PGA to not get behind her — that’s the Producers Guild — the Directors Guild to not get behind her, and then, ultimately, the Academy can’t back a film that is — quote, unquote — “has a controversy” over its inaccuracy.
Meanwhile, a film like “Argo” won for best screenplay and best picture. Not only was it historically inaccurate, but the main character is a Latino played by Ben Affleck.


LBJがキング牧師の問題に消極的だったという描き方への批判はいろいろなところで出ていますが、例えば以下です。

HISTORY OPINION
Why You Should Care That Selma Gets LBJ Wrong
David Kaiser Jan. 9, 2015
Even in the movies—and especially in this one—accuracy matters

The film Selma—in wide release Jan. 9—tells one of the most dramatic stories in modern American history, of Martin Luther King Jr.’s successful crusade for voting rights in Alabama in 1965. It triggered a smaller drama of its own when former Lyndon Johnson aide Joseph Califano attacked its portrayal of his old boss in the Washington Post. The film is a well-produced and well-acted drama that will draw a lot of Oscar attention. In many respects—but not all—it was well-researched. Some have argued that the inaccuracies are not important to the purpose of the film, or that accuracy is beside the point when it comes to movies that aren’t documentaries. But Califano was right: its portrayal of Lyndon Johnson and his role in the passage of the Voting Rights Act could hardly be more wrong. And this is important not merely for the sake of fidelity to the past, but because of continuing implications for how we see our racial problems and how they could be solved.


 

見せないという決断

 


昨日発売された最新号の一面について、PBSやNBCは映像を映さないとニュースで明言していました。AP通信のニュースも気をつかって撮影していますね。アメリカのほうが慎重になっているようです。



3分あたりから
JUDY WOODRUFF: Amid such appeals for harmony, Charlie Hebdo went to press again, with a defiant cartoon cover of the Prophet Mohammed holding a sign saying “Je suis Charlie.” The cartoonist defended the choice.
RENALD LUZIER, Cartoonist, Charlie Hebdo (through interpreter): Then there was nothing else but that, this idea of drawing Mohammed, “I am Charlie.” And I looked at him, he was crying, I cried. And it was the front page. We had found the front page. We had finally found that bloody front page.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Many news organizations, including the PBS NewsHour, have decided not to show the cover. The paper is printing up to three million copies.
French Muslim leaders today criticized the showing of representations of Mohammed, an act considered blasphemy by most Muslims. But they urged their followers to respect the right to free expression.


フランスの英語放送では以下のリンクのように表紙を見せていますが、このブログでも慎重になるべきなのではという立場なので直接見せることはしません。日本の天皇を風刺画で書かれるのはやはり不快に感じますから。。。

PARIS ATTACKS - Charlie Hebdo's front page stir anger amongst Muslims worldwide

ブロゴスでも紹介されていましたが、ニューヨークタイムズのDavid Brooksも慎重な態度を求めてもいます。

I Am Not Charlie Hebdo
JAN. 8, 2015

私はシャルリー・エブドではない
by ディヴィッド・ブルックス

もちろんアメリカのメディアは一枚岩ではなくDaily Beastなんかは内容を詳しく報じてくれています。

HOT OFF THE PRESSES01.14.15
Read the New Issue of Charlie Hebdo in English

 

Top Risks 2015

 
いつの間にか雑誌TIMEのforeign affairs columnist になっていたIan Bremmer。年末のTIMEにも大きく登場していましたね。

FOREIGN POLICY
America’s Uneasy Path Abroad in 2015

Ian Bremmer @ianbremmer Dec. 18, 2014

彼の運営するシンクタンクEurasia Groupが毎年発表する政治経済リスクのトップ10が発表される頃だなと思っていたら1月5日に発表していたようです。Morning Joeというテレビ番組でも丁寧に説明しています。



Top Risks 2015
Ian Bremmer, President
Cliff Kupchan, Chairman
Published January 5, 2015


THE RISKS
1 The Politics of Europe
2 Russia
3 The Effects of China Slowdown
4 Weaponization of Finance
5 ISIS, Beyond Iraq and Syria
6 Weak Incumbents
7 The Rise of Strategic Sectors
8 Saudi Arabia vs. Iran
9 Taiwan/China
10 Turkey
* Red Herrings


1位はThe Politics of Europe 。Charlie Hebdo襲撃事件の直前に発表されたものですが、European leaders, therefore, must manage domestic dissent, squabbling among governments, and external threats. We'll see bigger headline crises in a geopolitically tumultuous 2015.と恐ろしいほど予言的なものになっています。外側からみると「表現の自由」とか「イスラムvsヨーロッパ」の問題をまず考えてしまいがちですが、政治・経済の緊張状況が前提条件としてあったのですね。

1 - The Politics of Europe
Europe's economics are in substantially better shape than at the height of the Eurozone crisis. But the politics is now much worse. That's true on three different levels: bottom-up, intra-EU, and outside-in.

At the grass roots, it's a surge of public anger across Europe. While there's a level of social instability attached to that, the immediate problem is a range of political movements that are developing momentum. Some are far left; others are far right. All are euroskeptic, and all are challenging establishment parties that have lost political legitimacy. Their rise has been dramatic, shows little sign of slowing, and will become politically meaningful in 2015. In particular, Syriza is likely to win snap elections in Greece and join a governing coalition, and Podemos could actually win in Spain's general elections at the end of the year.

More broadly, this populist surge requires a move by the establishment parties toward more euroskeptic positions to ensure they remain in power. This trend is clear both in Europe's periphery and its core. In France, the rising popularity of the National Front (FN) means the Union for a Popular Movement will have to tack to the right to improve its chances of regaining power in 2017. In the UK, a challenge from the UK Independence Party has moved Prime Minister David Cameron toward a much tougher line on immigration and toward support for an in/out referendum on EU membership in order to win national elections in May. Even in Germany, the rise of the Alternatives for Germany party has limited Chancellor Angela Merkel's ability to support deeper European integration and Eurozone stabilization.

Friction among EU states is worsening. The best case for Europe would be Germany, France, and the UK working together to provide leadership. But that's far less likely in this environment; France can't temper German insistence on austerity over stimulus because France won't meet its deficit targets--and because President Francois Hollande's unpopularity (ratings have dipped as low as 13%, the lowest number for any French president ever!) is only encouraging the FN. The Brits are likely to remain disengaged given their own unresolved questions of EU membership. And new, more populist, peripheral governments will work to unwind the pension reforms, fiscal balances, and other hard-fought pieces of legislation that the Eurozone crisis made possible. This year, conflicts over fiscal balances between and among Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and a host of other European capitals will make America's Democrats and Republicans look like one big happy family.

The external political environment is more challenging, as well. The Russia crisis is set to escalate, and worries over potential security incidents between Europe and the Russian military--far higher than at any point between China and its Asian neighbors--leave Europe in no condition to handle the resulting economic consequences. Terrorist threats from Islamist militants are much greater than in any region outside the Middle East, given the number of European citizens fighting in Iraq and Syria, and the size of Muslim communities inside these countries. Perhaps most importantly, the transatlantic relationship is deteriorating. American unilateralism is a challenge for Europe on most every level. Washington has more interest in punishing Moscow and less interest in safeguarding Europe's economic wellbeing. Spying and the use of drones are poisoning European public attitudes toward Washington. The US-Britain relationship is closer on these issues, but relations between Americans and Germans--far more important for Europe's future--are further apart.

European leaders, therefore, must manage domestic dissent, squabbling among governments, and external threats. We'll see bigger headline crises in a geopolitically tumultuous 2015. Europe will bear the cost of most of them. And so, this year, the politics of Europe is our top risk.


アジアに関しては、中国、インド、日本、インドネシアの指導者は今年は経済問題に注力するので地政学リスクはむしろ低くなると予想しています。

Asia Nationalism

A lack of global leadership--what we call the G-Zero world--has created considerable geopolitical instability in recent years. But in Asia, leadership at the national level is now having the opposite effect. Four of Asia's key economies benefit from strong, charismatic, and popular leaders (especially in contrast to their predecessors): China's Xi, India's Narendra Modi, Japan's Shinzo Abe, and even Indonesia's Joko. All four are prioritizing sweeping domestic economic reform that's well overdue in their countries and, at least thus far, are enjoying some success. Most importantly, all four are pursuing these policies without their hands being forced by immediate crisis (unlike the American response to the financial crisis or the European response to the Eurozone crisis). This affords them more flexibility when challenges to their policy priorities arise, and greater likelihood of success--or at the least, significant progress before their efforts diminish.

And so despite plenty of domestic support for nationalism in Asia, these four critical actors have good reason to avoid foreign distractions, improve their regional economic ties, and keep security relations in balance. We'll surely see headlines around military confrontation in the South and East China Seas, Indian assertiveness (and Chinese concern) over Arunachal Pradesh, and talk of military buildup across the region. China's assertiveness won't disappear, though it's much more likely to remain focused on smaller states without ties to the West, such as Vietnam. Serious tensions are a longer-term concern. For 2015 at least, there's going to be a pragmatic restraint among Asia's powers, and an immediate move toward cooler heads in the event of any accidental incident.


TimeのウエブサイトではCharlie Hebdoの事件後に寄稿していました。ムスリム移民の置かれた状況を5つあげています。

5 Facts That Explain the Charlie Hebdo Attack
Ian Bremmer @ianbremmer Jan. 7, 2015

Immigration figures, unemployment numbers and an unpopular President all offer context to a terrorism attack

Wednesday’s attack on magazine Charlie Hebdo shocked France, but tensions with the country’s Muslim immigrant population have been building for years. It looks like these attacks were motivated by anger among Muslim militants that the newspaper had published cartoon images that mocked the Prophet Muhammad. There is no political or demographic trend that can explain such a cold-blooded murder, but the statistics below tell a disturbing story about how this crime will exacerbate already high tensions in France and across Europe, making life still more difficult for Muslim immigrants.

1. All-time highs for migration
2. Painful economic realities … and misconceptions
3. Anti-immigration goes mainstream
4. All-time lows for a French President
5. Passports — and lack thereof


正直日曜日の抗議集会にあれほどの政治首脳陣が集まることがピンとこなかったのですが、このような政治経済での緊張状況がヨーロッパにあるからこその対応だったのかもしれません。
 

ビルゲイツがロックだ

 


ビルゲイツも2014年のBest booksにピケティを選んでいましたね。

“Business Adventures” by John Brooks
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty
“How Asia Works” by Joe Studwell
“The Rosie Effect” by Graeme Simsion
“Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization” by Vaclav Smil.


ピケティは今月末来日するようですから、さらに注目を浴びそうです。下記のシンポジウムはまだ参加申し込みを受け付けています。土曜日の東大講義にはYutaは落選しました(涙)

1月29日(木) 18:30-21:00
シンポジウム「広がる不平等と日本のあした」

会場  有楽町朝日ホール (千代田区有楽町2-5-1 有楽町マリオン11階)
講師  トマ・ピケティ
パネリスト  鬼頭宏(上智大学経済学部特別契約教授)、玉木林太郎(OECD事務次長)ほか
司会  大野博人(朝日新聞論説主幹)
入場無料、日仏同時通訳つき
お申し込みは、1月15日まで、こちらで受け付けます。応募多数の場合は抽選となります。
主催  朝日新聞社、在日フランス大使館、アンスティチュ・フランセ日本
協力  みすず書房

ゲイツ財団を率いる、ビルゲイツは攻めていますね。最近話題になったのはこちら。



FROM POOP TO POTABLE
This Ingenious Machine Turns Feces Into Drinking Water

BY BILL GATES
ON JANUARY 5, 2015

If we get it right, it will be a good example of how philanthropy can provide seed money that draws bright people to work on big problems, eventually creating a self-supporting industry. Our foundation is funding Janicki to do the development. It’s really amazing to see how they’ve embraced the work; founder Peter Janicki and his family have traveled to Africa and India multiple times so they can see the scope of the problem. Our goal is to make the processors cheap enough that entrepreneurs in low- and middle-income countries will want to invest in them and then start profitable waste-treatment businesses.

We still have a lot to learn before we get to that point. The next step is the pilot project; later this year, Janicki will set up an Omniprocessor in Dakar, Senegal, where they’ll study everything from how you connect with the local community (the team is already working with leaders there) to how you pick the most convenient location. They will also test one of the coolest things I saw on my tour: a system of sensors and webcams that will let Janicki’s engineers control the processor remotely and communicate with the team in Dakar so they can diagnose any problems that come up.

The history of philanthropy is littered with well-intentioned inventions that never deliver on their promise. Hopefully, these early steps will help us make sure the Omniprocessor doesn’t join the list. If things go well in Senegal, we’ll start looking for partners in the developing world. For example I think it could be a great fit in India, where there are lots of entrepreneurs who could own and operate the processors, as well as companies with the skill to manufacture many of the parts.

It might be many years before the processor is being used widely. But I was really impressed with Janicki’s engineering. And I’m excited about the business model. The processor wouldn’t just keep human waste out of the drinking water; it would turn waste into a commodity with real value in the marketplace. It’s the ultimate example of that old expression: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.


ゲイツのブログの最後の言葉one man’s trash is another man’s treasureはtrashとtreasureでリズミカルになっていますね。

(Free Dictionary)
One man's trash is another man's treasure.
Prov. Something that one person considers worthless may be considered valuable by someone else.
Q: Why would anyone want to hang a picture like that on the wall?
A: One man's trash is another man's treasure.

A: Bob's uncle is always going through people's garbage, looking for old stuff.
B: One man's trash is another man's treasure.


新技術への投資だけは人を動かすには不十分と感じたのか、芸術家を巻き込んで世界の現状を伝えるプロジェクトにも関与しているようです。女優のミアファローや社会派の写真家サルガドなども参加しています。

Why Bill Gates Is Commissioning Fine Art
JANUARY 08, 201512:19 PM ET

Each year, about 6 million people die from diseases that are preventable with vaccines. And about 1 in 5 children around the world don't have access to life-saving vaccines.

But those are cold and dry statistics.

The Art of Saving A Life enlisted more than 30 artists to create images that bring those numbers to life — to spark conversations, interest and, ultimately, funding for vaccines.

その一つ。天然痘を題材にした動画公開されています。

 

Camaraderieの実例

 


映画『アメリカンスナイパー』を紹介する記事でcamaraderieが出ていました。Chris Kyleが殺害されてしまう痛ましい事件の説明のところですが、兵士の場合を想像したほうがcamaraderieのニュアンスはつかみやすいかもしれません。まあ、TOEIC頻出語ではないでしょう。

There is also the tragedy that, in the middle of the development of the project, Kyle—a national hero and military legend who had had a bounty placed on him by insurgents—was shot to death on February 2, 2013, along with another man, on a shooting range near Stephenville, Texas. Kyle had co-founded a nonprofit called FITCO Cares Foundation, which supplied at-home fitness equipment for emotionally and physically wounded veterans. He was 38 years old. The alleged shooter, an ex-Marine named Eddie Ray Routh, who had served several deployments and was said to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, has been charged with capital murder. Kyle, according to reports, had taken Routh to the range at Rough Creek Lodge as a show of camaraderie. It was something he had done before.

Cooper had talked to Kyle on the phone, but he never had a chance to meet him in person. “The terrible beauty of the story is how he died and his death,” Cooper tells me. “If you take that away, it’s a much different story.”




アメリカンスナイパーの公開に合わせてVanity Fairのカバーストーリーになっていたのですが、記事の導入はテキサスアクセント習得のために彼が毎日取り組んでいたことの紹介でした。動画の2分20秒あたりでもアクセント習得については語っています。話し言葉、アクセントはネイティブにとっても難しいようですね。

COVER STORY
Bradley Cooper Ventures Far Outside His Comfort Zone in American Sniper
With Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, Bradley Cooper earned star status, now on display in the Broadway revival of The Elephant Man. But with American Sniper, opening this month, Cooper reaches a whole new dimension, playing Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who was murdered in 2013. Buzz Bissinger discovers what a huge challenge the role represented.
BY BUZZ BISSINGER JANUARY 2015

Every day before going on location Bradley Cooper recited the six pages of exercises. They had been pieced together by his speech coach, Tim Monich, to further reinforce a Texas accent and dialect that Cooper knew, if it didn’t come to him automatically, would rob all credibility. In a film such as this, and a role such as this, the most challenging of Bradley Cooper’s career, there was no margin for error.
Don’t get it right, don’t do the movie. There are many Texas accents in Texas. This particular one, because of all the places the real-life character once lived, had parts West Texas and country Texas and home-on-the-range Texas, a little bit southern, a little bit western, a little bit shitkicker, with idiosyncratic inconsistencies, and yet poetic in its truncation.




生前のChris Kyleさんがこちら。ブラッドリークーパーはたくましいというより、性格の良いお兄ちゃんというイメージだったのですが、やはりKyleさんも同じように思っていたみたいですね。

Chris Kyle himself was excited when he sold the rights and learned that Cooper was going to play him, although he did have a caveat: “I’m going to have to tie him to my truck, drag him down the street, and knock some of the pretty off of him.”

Bradley Cooper Ventures Far Outside His Comfort Zone in American Sniperという記事タイトルにもあったように、今までのイメージに果敢に挑戦しKyleに少しでも近づけるよういろいろ取り組んで映画に挑んだようです。

During his workouts, Cooper listened to the exact playlist that Kyle had when he worked out as a navy SEAL in Iraq in between shifts, sometimes as long as eight hours, enveloped in his own urine because there was no opportunity to take a break when they were targeting insurgents bent on killing American soldiers and suspected collaborators. Kyle is credited with at least 160 confirmed kills.
Cooper bulked up from 185 to around 225. He started eating 5,000 calories a day. He was able at the end to do dead lifts of 415 pounds, five sets of eight reps each.

Former navy SEALs Rick Wallace and Kevin Lacz (he had served two deployments with Kyle) also trained him on how to hold and shoot the various weapons that Kyle utilized. Cooper never equaled the shot from 2,100 yards Kyle once made in Iraq, but he was able to hit targets from 600 yards. Lacz responded the way navy SEALs often respond to superb performance: he said nothing.

Cooper kept in character during the entirety of the shoot. He talked to his girlfriend, the 22-year-old British actress and model Suki Waterhouse, in character. He ordered food at a restaurant one night with dinner companions Miller and Eastwood in character: “Y’all got any red meat?” He argued over another film with producer Harvey Weinstein in character: Harvey, I just gotta tell ya, man, there’s no way that it’s gonna be possible for me to do this.

But it still doesn’t necessarily add up to a great performance. Maybe the expectations are too high. Maybe Bradley Cooper really is fucked.


動画でInside Actors Studioのショーンペンの回で質問をしているBradley Cooperが登場していましたが、記事でもLipton校長が彼について語っているところもありました。彼のファンならお勧めの記事です。

日本での公開は2月21日。アカデミー賞にもノミネートされそうですから話題になりそうです。

 

E-booksからno-booksへ?

 


英語学習者には音を聞いただけでストーリーがイメージできるようになるには訓練が必要ですが、Audiobookの方が直接な体験としてイメージが浮かびやすいという意見はAudibleのCMでも昨年のニューヨークタイムズのOpEdでもあります。

Audiobooks and the Return of Storytelling
FEB. 22, 2014

I find that when I listen to a story, instead of reading it on a page, my memory of the book does change. I remember more of the action and less of the language, although sometimes when I listen a sentence will drop into my mind and shock me into attention in a way that is less common when I read. (Mind you, it helps to have a good reader.) You don’t check back on previous paragraphs or read the last page first when you listen. You move forward, and what you carry with you is person and event.

I listen the way I read books as a child, as if I were there watching. The author becomes more transparent, the characters more real. Listening to “Bring Up the Bodies,” I don’t think, what is the author, Hilary Mantel, up to? I feel the threat of death damp on my skin. And when I have listened to a book in a particular place — the ferns beneath the oak trees — I remember the book when I come back to that place, as if my hands in the soil were digging up the words.


今までのAudibleは本を読むことが基本でしたが、昨年Jeffery Deaverが野心的な試みをしたのを知りました。本はなくAudibleでしか発売しない、29名の役者を揃えた本格的オーディオドラマを発表したのです。これもニューヨークタイムズのOpEdで知りました。これはなかかなすごいです。



Hearing Is Believing
By JAMES ATLASJAN. 10, 2015


THE thriller writer Jeffery Deaver has released an original work called “The Starling Project” as an audiobook — only it’s not what we think of as an audiobook: a printed book read aloud that you can listen to on your laptop or phone. Featuring 29 actors in more than 80 speaking roles combined with “state-of-the-art sound and music design,” Mr. Deaver’s “book” was conceived as an audio drama for Audible. There are no plans to turn it into a traditional text-based book, either on paper or digitally.

That was fast. First we went from books to e-books, and now we’re going from e-books to no-books. What’s next? Books embedded in a chip that delivers “content” directly into our brains?

Is such an innovation even necessary? When you think about it, that’s what audio does now. Listening is more efficient than reading: When we read, we absorb print with our eyes and translate it into “meaning,” a cumbersome process that requires us first to see the words, then to make sense of them, and finally to employ our imaginations to conjure up events and sounds and characters that aren’t there. Reception by aural means is more direct: All you have to do is listen. Not only that, you can multitask, driving to work or walking the dog.




The Starling Project (2014)
An aborted raid targeting a major arms dealer. A hostage standoff at a bank that may not be what it seems. A plot to spring a former African dictator from prison. What is the threat that connects them all? And just who is the mysterious mastermind, The Starling? From Mexico to Washington – from London to Marseille to Prague – war crimes investigator Harold Middleton and his team of Volunteers risk their lives to follow the trail of clues. But how can they stop The Starling – when he always seems one step ahead?
With more than 80 speaking roles and state-of-the-art sound and music design, The Starling Project is an immersive listening experience written by Jeffery Deaver.


このプロジェクトの背景を含めて幅広く取材した記事が昨年の11月にあったようです。Netflixのオリジナルドラマ「ハウスオブカード」などの成功に刺激を受けて企画されたみたいです。

An Art Form Rises: Audio Without the Book
By ALEXANDRA ALTERNOV. 30, 2014

“The Starling Project,” which came out in mid-November, will test the appetite for an emerging art form that blends the immersive charm of old-time radio drama with digital technology. It’s also the latest sign that audiobooks, which have long been regarded as a quaint backwater of the publishing industry and an appendage to print, are coming into their own as a creative medium.
Continue reading the main story

Just as original TV series like “House of Cards” and “Orange Is the New Black” transformed Netflix into a content creator as well as a distributor, Audible is aiming to distinguish itself in the booming audiobook market with original audio dramas that are written specifically for the form.

So far, Audible has commissioned and produced around 30 original works, as varied as a serialized thriller about a conspiracy that drives India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war, and original short stories set in the world of Charlaine Harris’s vampire novels.


実際聞いてみたのですが、オーディオブックではなくオーディオドラマですね。臨場感あふれて引き込まれます。自分が英語の勉強を始めた20年前には米軍ラジオのAFNがFENだった頃にラジオドラマがありました。それに近い感じですね。

Next year, the audiobook producer GraphicAudio will release its first two original series, including a Western crime drama and a full-cast epic fantasy that’s complete with elaborate sound effects and recorded in surround sound.

Some see the current audio renaissance as a modern version of the Golden Age of radio drama — a rare instance when technology is driving the evolution of an art form, rather than quashing it. Along with the surge in audiobooks, podcasts have become a surprising new form of popular entertainment, with some programs drawing audiences that rival those of cable shows. One standout example, “Serial,” a true-crime saga that re-examines the 1999 murder of a teenage girl in Maryland, unfolds in weekly episodes and has been streamed or downloaded more than five million times since its introduction in October.




この背景には停滞気味の本の市場に比べて、成長しているオーディオブック市場があるようです。また、オーディオブック市場内での競争も激しくなってきたので、Audibleに引き留める役割をこのようなオーディオドラマに担わせようとしているようです。

It’s no surprise that authors are eager to make their mark in the medium. As the print business stagnates, digital audiobooks are booming. In the first eight months of this year, sales were up 28 percent over the same period last year, far outstripping the growth of e-books, which rose 6 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Meanwhile, hardcover print sales for adult fiction and nonfiction fell by nearly 2 percent.

Audiobook publishers, scrambling to meet rising demand, released nearly 36,000 titles in 2013, up from 6,200 in 2010, according to the Audio Publishers Association. Audible, which Mr. Katz founded nearly 20 years ago and sold to Amazon in 2008 for a reported $300 million, still dominates the market, with more than 170,000 works, including 18,000 produced this year alone.

But the company faces growing competition as more companies seek a foothold in this fast-growing corner of the digital media marketplace. This month, Penguin Random House’s audio division introduced its first app, Volumes, which allows listeners to sample free content, play audiobooks from their digital libraries and buy audiobooks with one click from the iBooks Store. Barnes & Noble just released an audiobooks app for its Nook tablets and Android devices, with more than 50,000 titles.

Other newcomers jostling for a slice of the audiobook market include the e-book subscription platform Scribd, which recently added 30,000 audiobooks to its digital subscription plan, and Skybrite, a new streaming audio service that has 10,000 titles and an all-you-can-listen to membership for $10 a month.


音だけしかないので、場面展開などをどうするかDeaverは苦労したようです。ナレーションをいれたくなかったようですね。

First, he created a flow chart outlining a plot about a retired army intelligence officer, Harold Middleton, who is recruited to stop a shadowy mass-murder plot called “The Starling Project.” The action spans the globe, with scenes in Mexico, Washington, London, Marseille and central Africa.

Mr. Deaver quickly ran into problems, though. It was tricky to establish geographic locations through dialogue in a way that didn’t seem hokey (he opted for a flight attendant’s announcement in one scene, welcoming travelers to France). He struggled to incorporate sound effects without muddying characters’ conversations with blaring motorcycle engines and machine gun fire. Without an omniscient narrator, he had to find new ways to establish relationships between the characters.

“You don’t want to write too on the head and say, ‘I don’t like you, you did something bad back then,’ ” he said.

A sex scene also proved challenging. “I didn’t have a clue how to handle that,” he said. “Do we have a zipper sound? Two shoes falling to the floor?” (They went with swelling music instead of sound effects for that scene.) But Mr. Deaver adjusted his writing style to the medium, and he finished the book in about five months.


Audiobookブームはスマホが一人一台になってきた流れの現象でしょうか。新たなテクノロジー、メディアの出現によって我々の楽しみのあり方、消費の仕方が変わってくるのは面白いですね。そもそも小説が19世紀に流行するまでは、演劇や詩が王道だったのですから。。。Hearing is belivingでは以下のように語っています。口承文学はむしろ原点回帰なのかもしれません。

The aural/oral revolution won’t mean the end of the book any more than the e-book did. Besides, the “non-text-based” work of literature has a long tradition. “In the history of mankind, words were heard before they were seen,” wrote Albert B. Lord, the author of “The Singer of Tales,” a classic work of scholarship that traced oral literature from Homer through “Beowulf” and the tales, still recited today, of Balkan poets capable of reciting thousands of lines of verse by heart.

Progress doesn’t always mean going forward.


次もこういうのがあれば聞いてみたいと思います。新しいAudio book体験を是非!
 

TOEIC過去問から学べること

 
昨日アマゾンで「出版年月が古い順」を間違ってクリックしてしまって1980年9月28日(日)に実施された第三回問題集が表示されてしまいました。500円で売っていたので興味本位で買ってみました(苦笑)

1979年から1980年に実施された第一回から第三回までのTOEIC公開テストは
TOEIC過去問題集として発売されています。このあたりは以前Morite2先生が記事にされています。

せっかくなのでパート2と5を紹介しますので、興味のある方は解いてみてください。

31 What time does the conference begin?
(A) When the main speakers arrive.
(B) We’ll be through by nine o’clock.
(C) The conference began on time last year.


133 Jogging has become the favorite from ------- regular exercise for a lot of people.
(A) as
(B) to
(C) in
(D) of


(答えまでの埋め草)
「はじめに」に以下のような説明がありました。Equatingのためのリサイクルが終われば過去問として売り出すことは可能なようです。韓国ででた既出問題集も2006年の古いものだったのはきっとEquatingが終わったものだったからなのでしょう。

その後も、過去の問題を公開してほしとの要望が相次いでおり、ETS (Educational Testing Service) の了解を得て、徐々に要望に応えていくことになりました。
ETSは、原則として試験問題を公開しておりません。TOEICの場合も、当初は非公開という建前でしたが、大半のテストか公開されるわが国の慣習と、問題の公表が受験者や関係者に有益な情報提供となるという理由から、各回のテスト内容を、公開することにしたわけです。
ただし、equating(各回のテストの尺度を一定に保つために実施される標準化作業)のために、過去の試験問題の一部が再使用されているので、再使用が終了したところで、公開することとなります。


あと、TOEICの語彙レベルとして参照されることがあるのが以下のリサーチですが、分析データには注意が必要です。

ブリティッシュナショナルコーパスを用いたTOEIC語彙の分析
中條 清美(日本大学生産工学部)、Michael Genung(日本大学生産工学部)


4ページの注によると1979年から1980年までの公開テスト3回分と2000年と2002年に2冊出た旧公式問題集のデータを基に分析しています。2006年に新形式に移行した現在、このリサーチに準拠して語るにはあまりにも分析したTOEICデータが古くなってしまっています。

(答え)
旧TOEIC01
旧TOEIC02

「TOEIC過去問から学べること」としたのは解説が秀逸だったからです。受験者の回答データが、受験者を5段階のレベルに分けて紹介してくれているのです。これなら初学者が間違いやすい問題が一目でわかります。全問にこのデータはついていないのですが、TOEICを教えている側からするととても参考になるデータですよね。

第三回は1975名の受験者で、十万人を超えることが珍しくなくなってきた現在の公開テストと比較すると非常に少ないですが、教材でこれだけの受験生をモニターにしているものは多くないでしょう。このようなTOEICテストの受験者データ、回答データは教える側にとっては宝の山だと思います。Equatingが終わったものでもいいので、過去問および回答データを順次公開する方向にしてもらいたいと思います。

まあ、普通の人にとってはどうでもいい話でしたので、パート4とパート7も一問ずつ紹介します。もう少し長いものもありますが、今では考えられないくらい問題文が短いです。

Questions 97-98 are based on the following announcement?

There is no location providing easier access to Vancouver’s main business and financial district than the International Hotel. The International offers spacious air-conditioned rooms and suites, all with bath and shower.

97. What makes the International Hotel a good choice?
(A) Its location
(B) Its size
(C) Its rates
(D) Its restaurants

98. Who would most likely use the hotel?
(A) Tour groups
(B) Businessman
(C) Families
(D) College students


Questions 197-198 are based on the following memorandum?

TO: All Staff
FROM: Tom Jones, General Manager

Because Friday is a holiday, it will be necessary to complete the standard weekly reports early. Please have all necessary information ready at noon on Thursday.

197. What is the purpose of the memo?
(A) To request special information
(B) To cancel the weekly report
(C) To describe plans for the holiday
(D) To announce a change in schedule

198. The staff will include information on their activities from Monday morning through
(A) Tuesday afternoon
(B) Wednesday morning
(C) Thursday morning
(D) Friday afternoon

第三回のテストを見てみて古くさく感じる部分よりも、今でも問題として出せそうな表現が多い印象でした。基本表現は古びることがないのでしょうね。現行TOEIC対策にはなりませんが、以下のような通時分析をしてみたいなと思っています。

1980 第三回問題 (1セット)
2001 旧公式問題集 (2セット)
2006 既出問題集 (2セットぐらい)
2014 新公式問題集vol6 (2セット)
 

Newsweekが頑張っている

 
紙を復刊させても、まだいたの?という(失礼!)印象しか持たなかったのですが、久しぶりにカバーストーリを読みました。The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.(悪魔も自分勝手な目的のために聖書を引く)な状態になっている、アメリカのキリスト教原理主義批判が主な目的ですが、もともとの聖書がどんなものだったのか、英語にどのように翻訳されたのか、初期のキリスト教の歴史がどうだったのか、丁寧に説明してくれている記事になっています。8000語を超える長いものですが、聖書が歴史的にどういったものかよくわかるのでオススメです。

The Bible: So Misunderstood It's a Sin
BY KURT EICHENWALD / DECEMBER 23, 2014 6:54 AM EST

Words checked = [8669]
Words in Oxford 3000™ = [81%]

They wave their Bibles at passersby, screaming their condemnations of homosexuals. They fall on their knees, worshipping at the base of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments while demanding prayer in school. They appeal to God to save America from their political opponents, mostly Democrats. They gather in football stadiums by the thousands to pray for the country’s salvation.

They are God’s frauds, cafeteria Christians who pick and choose which Bible verses they heed with less care than they exercise in selecting side orders for lunch. They are joined by religious rationalizers — fundamentalists who, unable to find Scripture supporting their biases and beliefs, twist phrases and modify translations to prove they are honoring the Bible’s words.

This is no longer a matter of personal or private faith. With politicians, social leaders and even some clergy invoking a book they seem to have never read and whose phrases they don’t understand, America is being besieged by Biblical illiteracy. Climate change is said to be impossible because of promises God made to Noah; Mosaic law from the Old Testament directs American government; creationism should be taught in schools; helping Syrians resist chemical weapons attacks is a sign of the end times—all of these arguments have been advanced by modern evangelical politicians and their brethren, yet none of them are supported in the Scriptures as they were originally written.


英語への翻訳について触れているところです。

Translation Transubstantiation
Then comes the problem of accurate translation. Many words in New Testament Greek don’t have clear English equivalents. Sentence structure, idioms, stylistic differences—all of these are challenges when converting versions of the New Testament books into English. And this can’t be solved with a Berlitz course: Koiné is ancient Greek and not spoken anymore. This is why English translations differ, with many having been revised to reflect the views and guesses of the modern translators.

The gold standard of English Bibles is the King James Version, completed in 1611, but that was not a translation of the original Greek. Instead, a Church of England committee relied primarily on Latin manuscripts translated from Greek. According to Jason David BeDuhn, a professor of religious studies at Northern Arizona University and author of Truth in Translation, it was often very hard for the committee to find the correct English words. The committee sometimes compared Latin translations with the earlier Greek copies, found discrepancies and decided that the Latin version—the later version—was correct and the earlier Greek manuscripts were wrong.

The goal of the translators was to create a Bible that was a gorgeous work that was very accurate in its translation and clear in its meaning, but that didn’t happen. “The King James Bible is a beautiful piece of English literature,’’ says BeDuhn. “In terms of the other two goals, however, this translation falls short.”


この記事の目的はキリスト教右派が自分勝手な理由で聖書を引いているということで、いろいろと例をあげて批判しています。例えば、家族の価値観。マタイの19:29には「わたしの名のために、家、兄弟、姉妹、父、母、子供、畑を捨てた者は皆、その百倍もの報いを受け、永遠の命を受け継ぐ。」としています。相当アナーキーなことを聖書は言っているのですね。。。

Some of the contradictions are conflicts between what evangelicals consider absolute and what Jesus actually said. For example, evangelicals are always talking about family values. But to Jesus, family was an impediment to reaching God. In the Gospel of Matthew, he states, “And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.”

これ以外にも聖書の中の記述でもいろいろと矛盾があることや、後から付け加わった章があるとか、丁寧に説明してくれています。ネタバレ恐縮ですが、最後の部分です。本当に聖書が大事だというなら、自分勝手に引用せずに当時の状況を矛盾も含めて受け止めることこそが大切だろうというメッセージはどんなことに対しても重要ですよね。

The Bible is a very human book. It was written, assembled, copied and translated by people. That explains the flaws, the contradictions, and the theological disagreements in its pages. Once that is understood, it is possible to find out which parts of the Bible were not in the earliest Greek manuscripts, which are the bad translations, and what one book says in comparison to another, and then try to discern the message for yourself.

And embrace what modern Bible experts know to be the true sections of the New Testament. Jesus said, Don’t judge. He condemned those who pointed out the faults of others while ignoring their own. And he proclaimed, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”

That’s a good place to start.
 

今こそフランケンシュタイン

 
来月の100分 de 名著は、メアリ・シェリー『フランケンシュタイン』だそうです。19世紀の古典を今更というなかれ、昨年新たに注目を受ける機会があったのです。International Prize for Arabic Fictionというアラブ文学の賞でFrankenstein in Baghdadという作品が受賞しました。ちょうど今週のNewsweekも本を読む文化を絶やさないための試みをこの作品に絡めて書いていました。

Reading ‘Frankenstein’ in Baghdad
BY JANINE DI GIOVANNI / DECEMBER 21, 2014 9:15 AM EST

Sadek’s concern is that writers here are cut off from the international writing community and ISIS will alienate them more. “Fifty percent of the population here is under 20 years old,” he said. “We cannot isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Baghdad produced the first literary document on this planet. I don’t want us to be lost.”

He insists that despite great adversity, Iraqis keep writing. Last year Frankenstein in Baghdad, a novel by Ahmed Saadawi, won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in Abu Dhabi, the equivalent of the Booker Prize in the Arab world. It was a proud moment for Iraq. Frankenstein in Baghdad is a modern, wartime version of Mary Shelley’s 1818 horror-fantasy, with the plot focusing on a character who stitches together body parts of those killed in explosions throughout Baghdad. The monster he creates comes to life and begins a hideous campaign of revenge against those responsible for the deaths. One review said Frankenstein in Baghdad reflected “the general feeling of helplessness toward violence witnessed in Iraq.”

There have been attempts to connect Iraqi artists to the world, including some success stories. Tamara Chalabi, daughter of former Iraqi deputy prime minister Ahmed Chalabi, triumphantly brought a group of Iraqi artists to the Venice Biennale in 2012. So why not make Baghdad a “City of Literature”?



فرانكشتاين في بغداد Frankenstein in Baghdadفرانكشتاين في بغداد Frankenstein in Baghdad
(2013)
أحمد سعداوي Ahmad Saadawi

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受賞に関する記事はこちら。

Ahmed Saadawi Wins International Prize for Arabic Fiction for ‘Frankenstein in Baghdad’
BY MLYNXQUALEY on APRIL 29, 2014
On Tuesday night, International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) judging chair Saad Albazei announced that Iraqi author Ahmed Saadawi had won the 2014 award for his novel Frankenstein in Baghdad.

これだけ話題になった小説ですので読んでみたい気もしますが、英訳は今年の秋になるそうです。

Oneworld, Penguin to Publish English Translation of ‘Frankenstein in Baghdad’
BY MLYNXQUALEY on JANUARY 9, 2015 • ( 1 )
Just days before the announcement of the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction longlist, OneWorld and Penguin announce that they’ve bought English-language rights to the 2014 winner:

Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad will be published in both the US and the UK next autumn, by Penguin Books in the US and Oneworld in the UK. Although a contract is yet to be signed, the book will in all likelihood be translated by the Banipal-prize-winning Jonathan Wright and edited by the same Penguin team that brought out Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition.



Alia's Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq (Dragonfly Books)Alia's Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq (Dragonfly Books)
(2010/02/09)
Mark Alan Stamaty

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イラクと本で思い出したのが、Alia’s Missionという絵本があります。「3万冊の本を救ったアリーヤさんの大作戦」として和訳もされていたのですね。

暮らしや大切な文化遺産を一瞬のうちに破壊してしまう戦争。
2003年のイラク戦争の最中、図書館の貴重な本に危険が迫る。
政府に懇願するも拒否された図書館員のアリーヤさんは、
自らの命を危険にしながら近所の人々と3万冊の貴重な本を
運び出す大作戦を展開する。
心温まる本当の物語をアメリカの人気漫画家スタマティーが描く!


しかもGenius English Communication Iという大修館の英語の教科書に取り上げられているようです。すぐに英語教育をバカにする人たちは現状をどれだけおさえて語っているのでしょうか。いやあ知りませんでした(汗)

Read On! 10
Alia’s Mission
湾岸戦争中のイラクで図書館の本を守った女性の行動について学ぶ。
湾岸戦争中のイラクで図書館の本を守った女性の話を読むことで理解することができる。


実話を報じたニューヨークタイムズ紙の記事リンクも紹介し、発展学習もできるようにしています。

AFTER THE WAR: THE LIBRARIAN
AFTER THE WAR: THE LIBRARIAN; Books Spirited to Safety Before Iraq Library Fire

By SHAILA K. DEWAN
Published: July 27, 2003

日本では平和なのに本を読む文化は危機に瀕しているようですが。。。
プロフィール

Yuta

Author:Yuta
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