Wired最新号は国連英検者にオススメ

ちょっと釣り気味のタイトルにしましたが、今月はビルゲイツに編集協力を依頼して出来上がったもので、国際協力に興味ある方には是非オススメしたいものです。iPadをお持ちの方はわずか500円で購入できますので、是非是非。



技術とイノベーションが世界をよりよいものにすることができるという信念は共感できます。世界に関する興味はなく、TOEICなど英語資格にしか興味がないという方は下記ゲイツのエッセイの書き出し部分は自分でも使えるようにするとよさそうです。I am a little obsessed with fertilizer. (…) It’s the kind of topic I have to remind myself not to talk about too much at cocktail parties, since most people don’t find it as interesting as I do.（笑）

Bill Gates: Here’s My Plan to Improve Our World — 
And How You Can Help
BY BILL GATES11.12.136:30 AM

I am a little obsessed with fertilizer. I mean I’m fascinated with its role, not with using it. I go to meetings where it’s a serious topic of conversation. I read books about its benefits and the problems with overusing it. It’s the kind of topic I have to remind myself not to talk about too much at cocktail parties, since most people don’t find it as interesting as I do.

But like anyone with a mild obsession, I think mine is entirely justified. Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs that fertilizer has made possible. It helped fuel the Green Revolution, an explosion of agricultural productivity that lifted hundreds of millions of people around the world out of poverty.

These days I get to spend a lot of time trying to advance innovation that improves people’s lives in the same way that fertilizer did. Let me reiterate this: A full 40 percent of Earth’s population is alive today because, in 1909, a German chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to make synthetic ammonia. Another example: Polio cases are down more than 99 percent in the past 25 years, not because the disease is going away on its own but because Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk invented polio vaccines and the world rolled out a massive effort to deliver them.

Thanks to inventions like these, life has steadily gotten better. It can be easy to conclude otherwise—as I write this essay, more than 100,000 people have died in a civil war in Syria, and big problems like climate change are bearing down on us with no simple solution in sight. But if you take the long view, by almost any measure of progress we are living in history’s greatest era. Wars are becoming less frequent. Life expectancy has more than doubled in the past century. More children than ever are going to primary school. The world is better than it has ever been.

20年前のメリンダさんとのアフリカのサファリ旅行の写真が紹介されていたのですが、そこで目にした貧困が財団を通した貧困対策へのきっかになったようです。以下はその写真のキャプションです。

WE WENT ON A SAFARI TO SEE WILD ANIMALS BUT ENDED UP GETTING OUR FIRST SUSTAINED LOOK AT EXTREME POVERTY. WE WERE SHOCKED.

一番のメイン記事はビルクリントンも交えたインタビューになるでしょうか。



Bill Gates and President Bill Clinton on the NSA, Safe Sex, and American Exceptionalism
BY STEVEN LEVY11.12.136:30 AM

ちょっと現実的な見方になりますが、感謝祭やクリスマスを前にチャリティー気分が高揚する時期だから、ゲイツやクリントンが露出を増やしているのでしょうか？まあ、そんな現実はさておき、いろいろな内容盛りだくさんのWiredはいろいろなことを学べそうです。