ПОЛИТИКА КУРСА И НОРМЫ АКАДЕМИЧЕСКОЙ ЭТИКИ

I

 

4. Не опаздывать на занятия

5. Активно работать на занятиях

6. Не пропускать занятия по неуважительным причинам

7. Регулярно и добросовестно готовиться к занятиям

8. Отрабатывать занятия, пропущенные по уважительным причинам

9. Регулярно заниматься в библиотеке и дома самостоятельно

 

II

Дисциплинированность

Воспитанность

Доброжелательность

Честность

Ответственность

 

 

2.1 Статьи для перевода на английский язык

 

1. Houses of hope

The troops are ready. Before dawn one morning this week, the Red Ants will descend on Devlins, a 7,000-shack squatter camp near Soweto. These 300 black men in bright red overalls are prepared for trouble: the job is to take down people's homes. And the process recalls the worst days of white rule in South Africa, when au­thorities straggled to stem the illegal migra­tion of blacks to the country's economic cen­ter, Johannesburg. But now there is a critical difference. These squatters will get the break of their lives: new plots on the same land, and the chance eventually to own title to the property. They'll have basic roads, water, sewer pipes and, possibly, help building their own houses. "You won't believe thechange, once a guy is the owner of his own property," says the Ants' boss Johan Bosch, chairman of Wozani Security, which took on the latest slum "normalization" operation for the Johannesburg City Council.

Africa is waking up to the nightmare of helter-skelter urbanization, and some possi­ble antidotes to it. With South Africa in the lead, a new generation of technocrats is look­ing for better ways to wage a war of attrition between local authorities and peasants seek­ing jobs in the city. One spur is the recent finding that the continent is leading the world in urbanization; some 56 percent of Africans live in slums. Another is the cau­tionary example of Zimbabwe, where whole­sale land invasions were the first symptom of the once bountiful country's collapse into lawlessness and insolvency. Elsewhere inAfrica, the spread of multiparty democracy has given leaders new cause to listen to the poor. Elites have tuned in Hcrnando dc Soto, the Peruvian economist whose landmark 2000 book, "The Mystery of Capital," argues that giving squatters title to their land is the key to unlocking huge "dead" assets world­wide—strategies that have already helped clean up slums, notably in Latin America.

A fresh look is long overdue. Africa slept while the rest of the world unsuccessfully tried to forcibly relocate slums, or build ex­pensive welfare housing. Africa's poverty ruled out the latter solution; most of the con­tinent simply has tried to bulldoze shanty­towns. A generation of presidents who grew up in the hinterlands never accepted that slum dwellers belong in Lagos or Nairobi, not in a village. "Many politicians are still rather romantic about our rural past," says Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, executive direc­tor of UN-Habitat, the agency responsible for issues of urbanization.

There's nothing romantic about the way Africa's Big Men routinely treat squatters. As delegates gathered in Nairobi this month for a UN-Habitat's talkfest on slum issues, Kenyan police demolished part ot a squatter camp called Mathare on the out­skirts of the capital. After the raid, a woman named Magaret Wakonyo, 59_: said three men with iron bars and machetes had taken her money and clothes before demolishing her house. She and her 80-year-old hus­band spent the next week sleeping rough during a period of torrential rains. "We've lived here since 1963 and this is the sixth time they've destroyed the house," said her husband, Samuel. The Nairobi city plan­ner, Patrick Adolwa, concedes: "We have not been terribly nice to these people."

An exception is Tanzania, which has pulled its capital out of the mud by giving squatters 99-year leases on the ground they occupy. Dar es Salaam was infamous for garbage heaps and sprawling shack cities; 70 percent of its people live in unplanned neigh­borhoods. In 1996, President Benjamin Mkapa fired the elected city council and creat­ed a commission to clean up the slums. The starting point was a pledge never to demolish the squatters' houses. The result was awave of home improvement. With help from the commission, neighborhoods cleaned up the garbage and built 75 new police stations; crime has dropped. "These settlements now represent an investment," says Tumsifu Nnkya of the University of Dar es Salaam.

U.N. experts caution that Tanzania's suc­cess story can be misleading. The state owns most of the land, which greatly simplifies the task of promising residents "secure tenure." And most slum dwellers in Dar es Salaam live in houses they built; worldwide, most squatters rent from slum landlords. Simply giving title to shack dwellers—as de Soto suggests—can result in gentrification, as the poor move out to earn income as landlords. UN-Habitat proposes a range of solutions that include joint tenancy schemes, under which an entire community takes title to land. One such experiment has upgraded a Kenyan slum near the town ofVoi.

South Africa leads the continent in the race to stave off land hunger. Its myriad strategies include giving slum dwellers title to their houses—mostly "matchbox" township houses they long had rented from the government. The government also dispenses housing subsidies and • facilitates their use as collateral for the conversion into homes by private contrac­tors—though low rates have driven many out of the business. The waits are long, discouraging a rush to take advantage of the» benefits. But since 1994, the post-apartheid ANC government has spent 16.8 billion rands (more than $2 billion) building 1.2 million houses. In all, the ini­tiative has provided secure shelter to 5 million people. A new organization of the homeless has pooled $600,000 in sav­ings and built 15,000 houses. "We have achieved a lot; we started with nothing," says Housing Minister Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele. The government plans to provide up to 2 million additional homes, and to achieve that, officials are reaching for ever more creative solutions. In one experiment, a unique citywide partner­ship between the public and the private developers has built 771 homes for former shack dwellers in the tony wine-country town of Franschoek; next the firm will market mini-vineyards to foreigners at $1 million each. "It is possible for us to enjoy peace," says Jack Clark, one of the plan's backers. "We just have to create a society where there's hope." The rest of Africa is watching.

 

2. Learning the Old Ways

THE Toddlers clad in sanity Chinese tunics don't seem to be taking the day's lesson to heart. As one 5-year-old girl recites from the Confucian classic, Discipline of Students, boys in the back row smack each other with their textbooks. Another girl in the front row breaks into tears. The speaker's mother confesses she's not even sure her daughter understands her lines, but she insists, "My daughter has be­come much more polite since she started attending classes here." Yuan Shiqui, an of-ficial at the National Studies School in the Andingmen district of Beijing, echoes the optimism. "They don't necessarily under-stand what they're reciting," he says of the preschoolers. "But gradually it will have an impact on their thinking."

That has always been the strategy be-hind the classic Confucian education: memorize moral precepts in the hope of improving one's character. In the early years of the 20th century, Chinese intellec-tuals blamed the system for stilling creative thought and weakening the country's abili-ty to resist technologically advanced for-eigners. After the communists took over in 1949, Confucius himself became a class en-emy; for decades his works were castigated as medieval pap.

In their quest for something to believe inother than the party or money, however, .Chinese have begun to rediscover the teachings of their most renowned moral­ist. Nationwide more than 2 million children are enrolled in programs similar to the one at Andingmen, where they learn Confucian works like the Three Character Classic and the Analects by heart. Sever­al major universities have set up degree programs in Chinese traditional culture. Confucian temples aban­doned for the last half cen­tury have been spruced up and now draw crowds of students, burning incense and praying for high marks in their entrance exams. "Even real-estate compa­nies have called to ask us to set up schools in their complexes," says Yang Di-sheng, vice president of the China Confucius Socie­ty. "They thought this would help them sell apart­ments faster."

The appetite for a return to traditional values—and traditional means of instilling them—is not hard to ex­plain. Chinese haven't believed in commu­nism as an ideology for almost two decades. The so-called money worship of the 1980s has given way, particularly among parents, to an acknowledgment of the social costs of China's economic boom. "Money is not everything. You have to have a concept of family and of relations between people," says Yang. Traditional scholars argue not only that Confucian precepts offer a means of re-establishing firm values in so-ciety, but that they are fun-damental to the idea of being Chinese. As far back as the 19th century, scholars argued that Confucian values needed to be promoted as a counterbalance to the scientific knowledge be-ing imported from the West. The question, then as now, says Don Wyatt, professor of history at Middlebury College, was, "How do we become modern while retaining our core values, because, after all, that's what has gotten us this far?"

Critics, however, might re-phrase the question: how do we become modern if we keep trying to retain our core val-ues? Leaving aside those Chinese who believe that Confucian ideas instill only a feudal mind-set, most education experts in Asia now agree that the problem with the region's schools is too much rote memorization, not too little. Turning to home-spun teachings might be attractive—particularly to parents who suffered through the topsy-turvy moral vacuum of the Cultural Revolution. But many education professionals would argue that institu-tions like the Saint Tao Experimental School, which teach the same core curriculum as state schools but use mem-orization, are not capable of preparing young Chinese for the country's breathtak-ing modernizations.

Thus far the government has not taken a stand on the Confucian revival. But authorities obviously want to remain on the right side of a spontaneous and growing popular move­ment. Last year top leaders supported the opening of a $25 million research insti-tute devoted to studies of Confucius in his birthplace of Qufu. Wyatt argues that the state has good reason to co-opt the movement: "China discovered long ago that the same values in Confucianism can be used to create docile and obedient citi-zens who are in the service of the state," he says. The country's youngest Confu-cianists may indeed be learning more than they realize.

 

3. A place in The Sun

Suddenly, it’s a point of pride to be French. Not European, mind you. Not a global citizen, cer­tainly. But tricolor-waving, baguette-toting, looking-down-a-long-de Gaullean-nose French. And why? Because those who have tended to treat France as an also-ran in the global power game (yes, Germany and the United States) are suddenly confronted with the fact that the Gauls are—one hesitates to say this—al­most as important as they think they are.

France's quiet and quite confident new assertiveness can be seen on several fronts just now. At the United Nations, Washington gripes about French resistance to its bulldoz­er resolution authorizing an attack on Iraq. But the Americans have known all along that the French were best able to finesse a diplo­matic compromise with recalcitrant Russia and China on the Security Council—even if the result may, in the end, be closer to France's vision than the United States'.

But it's in the economic field, especially, that France really seems to be making its own rules—and stirring up Europe's politi­cal beehive. Since President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raf-farin, took office five months ago, they have followed a simple principle: France first. Do other countries want to cut down subsi­dies to French farmers and impose quotas on French fishermen? Forget it. (The mat­ter was settled with Germany recently, overwhelmingly on French terms.) And when Raffarin (finally) made his first trip to Brussels last month, he might as well have said, "Read my lips." Lower the Euro-taxes imposed on food and drink served in French cafes, he demanded. Thanks to such national "egotism," moaned Le Monde in an editorial, France "is becoming the black sheep of Europe."

If so, Finance Minister Francis Mer doesn't seem to mind. Meeting in Luxem­bourg last week with 11 of his peers on the committee overseeing Europe's single cur­rency, he rebuffed pressures to cut France's budget by 0.5 percent next year to comply with the European Union's increasingly shaky "stability pact." The no-nonsense in­dustrialist showed his steelmakers' grit: raise taxes and slash spending, just when economic hard times would seem to argue for doing precisely the opposite? Jamais. "There are other priorities in France," he said, chief among them boosting growth-regardless of what others might think. In a stroke, France has changed the way Europe works, breaking from the culture of com­promise and consensus that's governed the eastern Atlantic community for decades.

What's going on here? At a time when Frenchmen of every intellectual stripe are bashing the United States for "unilateral­ism," could a variant of the old Gaullist ar­rogance be showing itself? Not quite. For all the tough talk, France isn't making a strategic doctrine out of narrow self-interest. It's not about to pull out of the euro, let alone Europe. But there's no denying the flutter of anxiety (and, in some quarters, hope) that Paris's recent actions have sent through the Union— especially considering the con­text. Just last week, after all, the European Commission formal­ly opened the door to 10 new members by the end of 2004. If this "big bang" is to work, the EU must dramatically change everything, from the way it makes decisions to how it spends its money.

French leadership will be key. Chirac has always wanted to climb into the driver's seat. But when it came to the great European Project (ever-closer union) France always worked in tandem with Germany. Now that partnership has frayed. The political bonhomie shared by the likes of Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Schmidt is gone. So is France's post-unification fear of Germany, which underlies the partnership. Germany's size and economic strength intimi­dated France into a geopoliti­cal collaboration that accom­plished much—not least the Eu­ropean Union—but at bottom reflected a deep sense of the country's own weakness, ac­cording to the French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. No longer. Today, Germany is the "sick man" of Europe, drawn inward by its own social and eco­nomic problems and no longer able to finance many of the programs that bolstered its leadership in the past. Even German population growth is so weak, says Todd, "that very soon Germany will be the same size as France." This return to equality, felt in Berlin as well as in Paris, opens the way for France to exert more leadership than it has in decades.

You need only examine the events of the past week to appreciate the scope of this remarkable turnaround. Chirac knows that all he needs is the support of Germany to speak for "Europe," or at least continental Europe. Thus, on Iraq, France has taken advantage of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's firm op- position to war to broker a compromise in the Security Council—to the commingled chagrin and gratitude of the Bush admin­istration. The French line: let's get inspec­tors into Iraq with one resolution, and pass another if they run into opposition. That deprives the Americans of the hair trigger they seek to launch a war, but it avoids a Russian veto and probably gets China, as well, onboard. Until recently an afterthought in Washington, France has emerged as a pivotal player.

Chirac seems determined to exercise no less a role back in Europe. Just a few months ago, during the presidential elec­tion campaign, all the talk was of the French "malaise." But now, just as Ger­many sinks deeper into decline, France is taking determined steps to streamline and rejuvenate its economy. It's not just Mer's embrace of go-it-alone Keynesianism to prime the economy. The government has also made several recent moves that signal its pro-growth, pro-business intentions, from incentives for small-business forma­tion (now lagging even Italy and Spain) to delivering on Chirac's electoral promises to cut taxes, create jobs and even boost military spending. Almost alone on the Continent, the Chirac-RafFarin govern­ment recognizes that in order to under­take the more serious structural reforms that will ensure the Union's long-term fu­ture, the country must first enjoy a cli­mate of growth and consumer optimism. Otherwise it risks the massive social fall­out that brought down the last Gaullist government under Alain Juppe five years ago. There's a clear realization that out­dated Euro-economics won't suffice. And a willingness, if other members don't see the light, to ignore them.

All this may surprise those who thought Europe was "consensualized" to the point of paralysis—or who idealized it as a "post­modern paradise," free of any real exercise of competitive national power, as the American analyst Robert Kagan would have it. In fact, Europe is not a place where the lion and the lamb, the Germans and the French, lie down together in perfect har­mony. "Europeans do not become, say, Danes just because they are engaged in the European project," says Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. In the new Europe, as in the old, power is likely to be brokered "vicious­ly and frequently," he says, even if the bat­tles are fought in Luxembourg conference rooms and not in Flanders' fields. What the French now know is that they are back in the game.

 

4. Will the blogs kill old media?

A year ago, Glenn Reynolds hardly qualified as plankton on the punditry food chain. The 41-year-old law professor at the University of Tennessee would pen the occasional op-ed for the L. A. Times, but his name was unfamiliar to even the most fanatical news junkie. All that began to change on Aug. 5 of last year, when Reynolds acquired the soft­ware to create a "Weblog," or "blog." A blog is an easily updated Web site that works as an online daybook, consisting of links to interesting items on the Web, spur-of-the-moment observations and re­al-time reports on whatever captures the blogger's attention. Reynolds's original goal was to post witty observations on news events, but after September 11, he began providing links to fascinating arti­cles and accounts of the crisis, and soon his site, called InstaPundit, drew thou­sands of readers—and kept growing. He now gets more than 70,000 page views a day (he figures this means 23,000 real people). Working at his two-year-old $400 computer, he posts dozens of items and links a day, and answers hundreds of e-mails. PR flacks call him to cadge cover­age. And he's living a pundit's dream by being frequently cited—not just by fellow bloggers, but by media bigfeet. He's blogged his way into the game.

Some say the game itself has changed. InstaPundit is a pivotal site in what is known as the Blogosphere, a burgeoning samizdat of self-starters who attempt to provide in the aggregate an alternate me­dia universe. The putative advantage is that this one is run not by editors paid by corporate giants, but unbespoken out­siders—impassioned lefties and righties, fine-print-reading wonks, indignant cranks and salt-'o-the-earth eyewitnesses to the "real" life that the self-absorbed me­dia often miss. Hard-core bloggers, with a giddy fever not heard of since the Internet bubble popped, are even predicting that the Blogosphere is on a trajectory to eclipse the death-star-like dome of Big Media. One blog avatar, Dave Winer (who probably would be saying this even if he didn't run a company that sold blogging software), has formally wagered that by 2007, more readers will get news from blogs than from The New York Times. Taking him up on the bet is Martin Nisenholtz, head of the Times's digital operations.

My guess is that Nisenholtz wins. Blogs are a terrific addition to the media universe. But they pose no threat to the established order.

Consider recent high-tech history. When the Web first emerged, we heard similar predictions that Big Media were sit­ting ducks for upstart competitors with cool Web sites. Didn't happen. The Web made it easier to publish, but couldn't drive readers to your door. The majority of news-surfers visit only the top few sites.

Granted, Weblogs are so easy to use that even a journalist can run a site—40,000 bloggers are up and running. But once you've created your blog and filled it with news accounts, snarky criticisms and witty political rants, how do you get visitors? Judging from the top blogs, the answer seems to be working hard, filling a niche, winning a reputation for accuracy, develop­ing sources and writing felicitously. This sounds a lot like the formula to succeed as a journalist inside the Big Media leviathan. With the difference that traditional jour­nalists uh, get paid.

What makes blogs attractive—their im­mediacy, their personality and, these days, their hipness—just about ensures that Old Media, instead of being toppled by them, will successfully co-opt them. You might argue that it's happened already. Some of the most popular blogs are those created not by disaffected outlaws, but by slum­ming professionals who apparently think that writing for big-time journals and bloviating on 24-hour cable is insufficient exposure for their views. So you have the likes of New York Times Magazine con­tributor Andrew Sullivan blogging on the church, sexuality and his recent adoption of a beagle. Sometimes a journalist's blog is not independent, but part of his or her employer's Web site—call it a. job blog. I love tech writer Dan Gillmor's site, but would his boss, Knight Ridder, host it if the company really believed that blogs were stilettos in the ribs of Old Media?

Already we're seeing some of the more popular practitioners sell out entirely to the Big Guys. Last week pioneer journo-blogger Mickey Kaus rocked the Blogosphere by announcing that Microsoft-owned Slate had snapped up his one-man shop Kausfiles lock, stock and software.

 

5. Will We Ever Stop the Global Warming?

AN AIMLESS RAMBLE THROUGH the countryside used to be about as far as you could get from the hurly-burly of politics. Half a century ago Richard Fitter strolled through Oxfordshire making notes on local birds and plants. He recorded the arrival of the first blossoms of spring, the first birds to sing and the test butterflies to emerge from their co­coons. As a professional naturalist, he turned the fruits of his walks into popular books such as "London's Natural History" and "The Wild Flowers of Britain and Eu­rope." but he had no pretensions toward academic research. He just thought that some day, someone might find his observa­tions important.

His son, Alastair Fitter, grew up in a !ess innocent age. As head of the biology department at the University of York, he locked at his father's 47 years of meticu­lous scribbling on 385 different species of British plants and saw a potentially valu­able addition to the debate over global warning. He analyzed the data and re­ported the results of his findings in a pa­per published last month, with his father, in the journal Science. Father and son found that 16 percent of the Oxfordshire plants studied have been flowering signifi­cantly earlier in the 1990s than in previ­ous decades. The white dead nettle, a small, common perennial with white flowers, has been blooming in January rather than March, 55 days early. "Spring is changing,'' says the younger Fitter.

The finding is just the latest in a spate of new data on global warming that comes not from climate scientists with their weather balloons and elaborate computer models, but from biologists and geologists in the field. Last week President George W. Bush got a similar message in the form of a report issued from his own adminis­tration on the status of climate change in the United States. Judging from his reac­tion, it was as expected as a June snow­storm, and just about as welcome. "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," he said. The report made headlines because it supposedly amounted to Bush's admission that the Earth really is warming and that carbon emissions are the cause. Would the United States soon follow Japan, which joined Europe last week in ratifying the Kyoto treaty to curb carbon emissions? Not a chance. Bush's handlers held fast to their reluctance; since there's still the shadow of a doubt, they seemed to say, let's just sit tight.

Despite the political bickering, it's becoming clear that Earth's ecosystems have already cast their vote: they've begun the process of adapting to a warmer world. It isn't just the word of a few English natural­ists. Scientists reported last week that Greenland's glaciers have been sliding into the sea at an accelerated pace. Water, appar­ently from more-rapid-than-usual melting. seeps between the glaciers and the underly­ing ground and acts as a lubricant Last March, a Rhode Island-size hunk of ice ш Antarctica broke off and fell into the sea-sign of warming at the South Pole Biologists in Europe and the United States have reported birds extending their ranges northward. A British and French study found that higher temperatures in the North Atlantic are causing warm-water species of ocean plankton to migrate north. And a Eu­ropean-American team used satellite data to show that trees in the northernmost quarter of the planet are becoming green earlier, and staying green longer.

The specter of Earth adapting to human-induced climate change, and the uncertainty over how those effects will courage similar disruptions. The French and British study noted that as warm-water plankton moves north, it leads to a drop in native cold-water-plankton populations. That's bad news for any fish in the area, such as the already overfished North Sea cod, which feed on the cold-water species. "It's not the plants I'm worried about," says Fitter, "it's the idea that people may eventu­ally suffer if these changes continue."

The latest data give cause to wonder if there's anything policymakers can plausibly do to stop the world's climate from warm­ing. Despite all the clucking over Bush's spurning of the Kyoto plan, the fact re­mains that it is problematic at best. As op­ponents of Kyoto point out, Europe's emis­sions cuts have much to do with Germany's dismantling of old coal plants and Britain's move to natural gas—which would have happened without a treaty. And even if Bush threw his support behind Kyoto, the impact on global warming would be negli­gible by any calculation.

Environmental groups in the United States used to argue the importance of the Kyoto plan as the beginning of a process of curbing carbon emissions, one that would require a vigorous follow-through beyond its end date in 2012. Some of them have now abandoned that tack. All the fuss over Kyoto, they've concluded, may in fact be doing their cause more harm than good. "Kyoto is really not a major domestic prior­ity for us, simply because we don't think it's an achievable goal," says John Coifman of the Natural Resources Defense Council. NRDC is instead lobbying for piecemeal steps, such as stricter emissions controls on SUVs. Along with other groups, it is also at­tacking Bush's links with big oil. Memos between ExxonMobil and the White House's energy task force, for instance, suggest that the oil company's influence may have led to several of the administra­tion's policy moves, such as its decision last April to block reappointment of the chair­man of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Reversing the planet's warming trend will take more than piecemeal change or Kyoto. While the stalemate continues, sci­entists like Fitter will keep collecting data. He has begun a new round of experiments to examine how native grass flowers when temperature is increased three degrees via heat coils placed on the ground. He also plans to begin the monumental task of col­lating and examining his father's data on butterflies and birds. On those yellowing scraps of paper, it's likely he'll find more ev­idence that our planet is changing.

 

6. Fighting G-force

ZIPORA JACOB WASN'T EXACTLY a thrill-seeker. On a 1995 day trip to Disneyland, the 42-year-old didn't venture onto a ride until evening, when she hopped on the Indiana Jones Adventure. Though it was slower than most roller coasters, its high-tech hydraulics made it seem speedier and jerkier. "When the ride stopped, I felt my head was exploding," says Jacob. By the next morning, she was in a coma from a massive brain bleed. She endured surgeries and memory loss, and still has a permanent shunt draining fluid from her brain. Jacob settled a lawsuit with Disney in 1999; two other lawsuits have claimed injuries on the ride. Disney says independent testing has shown that the G-forces and motion of the ride aren't sufficient to cause injury. Jacob thinks otherwise: "A nice day at the amuse­ment park can become a nightmare for the rest of your life."

In the past decade, new megacoasters have gone extreme, boasting speeds of more than lOOmph, back-to-back loops and G-forces that rival the space shuttle's. "We've moved from an era of Model T-roller coast­ers to one of supersonics," says Massa­chusetts Rep. Ed Markey, who has catalogued 58 brain injuries—including eight fatalities— on thrill rides, most since 1990. The roller-coaster industry says 320 million people en­joyed rides last year mostly without incident. "It truly is one of the safest family activities you can engage in," says Bret Lovejoy of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions.

That hasn't stopped a new drive to regu­late the rides' gravitational or G-forces. The normal pull of gravity upon the body is one G, but acceleration increases that pull. Some scientists believe that high G-forces on coasters could distort the brain within the skull. The space shuttle maxes out at less than four Gs, but some parks used to brag that their coasters fleetingly topped six Gs—an unsafe level according to Markey, who's introduced a bill to create a national G-force standard. Last month, New Jersey became the first state to issue its own G-force limits. The coaster indus­try insists engineers have better control over G-forces than ever. Even so, the in­dustry is announcing standards of its own later this month.

Despite the flurry of rulemaking, the link between G-forces and injuries hasn't been scientifically proven. Some re­searchers say rapid jerking of'the head could be far more dangerous than G-forces, tearing blood vessels in the brain. But even that may be rare, limited mainly to those with pre-existing con­ditions like aneurysms. Jacob says she was perfectly healthy.before she stepped aboard the Disney ride—a caution­ary tale for the millions who'll line up at parks this summer, hoping for the thrill of their lives.

 

7. Are you on top of the world?

These days most doctors and scientists agree that our physical health is closely related to our psychological well-being. But just what have the experts discovered about what makes us feel good?

Some things that can make you feel better ...

as well as being important to your physical health, regular exercise is now believed to improve your psychological state by releasing endorphins or 'happy chemicals' into the brain. Some researchers consider it can be just as valuable as psychotherapy in helping :epression, and engendering a more positive outlook. Even a briskten-minute walk every day can help according to researchers. In one project, unemployed urban youths who undertook intensive sports training for several months, not only became involved in that sport, but also in other activities such as study, politics, and voluntary work.

 

A lively social life

According to experts, companionship and social support are vital to both our psychological and physical well-being - one reason, perhaps, why married people tend to live longer than unmarried ones. Modern researchers emphasise the value of group social activities in this respect. 'Relationships we form at church or in clubs tend to be more supportive and uncritical than those we form at work or in the family,' says Professor Michael Argyle, of Oxford Brookes University, 'and these positive relationships improve our self-esteem, which is vital to our physical and mental health.' This is backed upby recent research which shows, perhaps surprisingly, that people who spend more time with others actually get fewer colds and viruses than those who stay at home on their own. In fact social support is so important to our mental and physical well-being that it may even increase our life expectancy! Another piece of research found that people who belong to strong church groups, not only claim to be happier than those who don't, they suffer from less than half the number of heart attacks than the rest of the population, and live up to four years longer!

 

Watching soap operas on TV

One rather surprising piece of research found that on average, people who regularly watch soaps on television are significantly happier than those who don't! Psychologists believe that this is because such programmes provide viewers with an imaginary set of friends, and a sense of belonging to a community, in the same way that a club or a church might.

 

Self-indulgence

Many scientists these days believe that indulging in life's little pleasures - a bar of chocolate, a glass of wine, a shopping trip, even a cigarette - can actually improve your health, because of the psychological lift it gives you. 'There is evidence, for example,' says Professor David Warburton of Reading University, 'that old people living in residential homes who have a cocktail hour each day actually live longer! Indulging - in moderation - in the small pleasures of life can make people calmer, alleviate stress and provide positive health benefits. There is a lot of truth in the old saying that "a little of what you fancy does you good."'

... and some that can make you feel worse

 

Low self-esteem

Feeling like an underdog, it seems, can damage your health. Research by the National Rheumatism and Arthritis Council showed that workers who feel undervalued or out of control at work, are significantly more likely to suffer from back problems. Depression, a spokesman claimed, is actually far more likely to cause backache than heavy lifting. Professor Warburton of Reading University believes that one of the greatest health threats comes from negative feelings such as depression or guilt, which create stress hormones, producing cholesterol. 'It's quite likely that by worrying about whether or not you should be eating a chocolate bar you are doing yourself more harm than just getting on and eating it,' says the professor!

Lack of bright light

 

Scientists have known for some time about Seasonal AffectiveDisorder (SAD): a form of depression caused by lack of light in winter, and thought to explain the relatively high suicide rates in countries such as Sweden, where for parts of the year days are very short. However, recent research has shown that those working night shifts in factories can suffer from the same problem, leading to stress and depression. The problem can be overcome by illuminating workplaces with lights three times brighter than usual, making workers feel happier and more alert.

A low-fat diet may be good for your waistline, but the latest research suggests that it is less beneficial psychologically. A team of volunteers at Sheffield University, asked to follow a diet consisting of just twenty-five per cent fat (the level recommended by the World Health Organisation) reported a marked increase in feelings of hostility and depression. And an earlier piece of research revealed, startlingly, that people on low-fat diets are more likely to meet a violent death!

Many of us are already aware that drinking coffee raises your blood pressure and can cause anxiety, but according to the latest research it can also make you bad-tempered. Mice who were given regular doses of caffeine by researchers, were found to be unusually aggressive!

 

The wrong genes

Despite all the changes we make to our behaviour, diet, and environment, there is growing evidence that at the end of the day, whether we are cheerful or miserable is largely a question of our genes. 'Of course what happens to you in your life will make a difference to how happy you are,' say scientists, 'but there are two or three vital genes which probably decide how cheerful you are in comparison to others in a similar situation.' So whatever else you do, make sure you choose your genes carefully!

 

8. In the public eye

Originally an actor, Ronald Reagan served two terms as President of the United States in the 1980s, but he always remained an actor at heart. When he won the election for Governor of California, Reagan was asked what he planned to do when he took office. 'I don't know,' he replied, 'I've never played a governor.' And at the 1987 Economic; Summit in Venice, Italy, the leaders of the world's industrialations were surprised to see Reagan reading his lines off specially written cards: not just at important meetings, but even a: informal cocktail parties! But Reagan is not the only one who has used his fame to make an impact in the political world ... The star of such films as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Dirty Harry (1971) and Sudden Impact (1983), Hollywood actor Clint Eastwood took time off from his film career to serve two years as mayor of Carmel, California (population 4,800) in the 1980s, at a monthly salary of just $200. Frustrated by petty bureaucracy and regulations, Eastwood entered politics insisting that his concern was strictly with Carmel and that he had no larger ambitions, 'I approached it from a business point of view. not a political one.' His slogan was simple, 'Bring the community together', and the proudest achievement of his two years in office was the construction of a new children's annexe at the local library Until 1997, 46-year-old Rosemary Scallon was famous for one thing only: at the age of eighteen, as Dana, she had become the first Irish winner of the Eurovision Song Contest with, a naive little song entitled 'All Kinds of Everything'. Twenty-eight years later, now living with her husband and four children in the United States, Rosemary Scallon stood for the Presidency of Ireland on a non-party platform. She launched her campaign claiming, 'There's nothing in the Constitution to say I can't sing as President'. At first her candidacy was widely seen as a joke, but in the end her campaign, based on traditional Christian values and morals, gained her fourteen per cent of the vote and established her as a force to be reckoned with in Irish politics. In a career lasting more than twenty-five years, Romanian tennis star Ilie Nastase won fifty- seven titles, and was rated the world's number one player in 1973. For all the brilliance of his play, he was also known for his flashes of temper and eccentric behaviour: once, he left the court during a doubles rally to chat to a blonde woman in the front row of the crowd. When his furious partner asked him why he hadn't finished the point, Nastase replied, 'There'll be another point in a minute ... there might never be another woman like that.' After retiring in 1985, he became a successful businessman, with homes in Romania, France, and the United States. In 1996 - apparently shocked at the poor state of the city's roads - he decided to run for mayor in his childhood home of Bucharest, 'I tell my opponents they are ugly, lining their own pockets, and don't have a clue how to fix the city's most serious problems,' he said. Nastase failed to secure a majority, however, and left politics almost as quickly as he had entered it. Irene Saez is Venezuela's most popular politician and a likely President of the future. In 1981, she was crowned Miss Universe, but turned down lucrative Hollywood offers to finish her graduate studies in political science. In 1995, she entered politics and won election as the mayor of Chacao, a district in Venezuela's capital city, Caracas. She managed to sort out the financial deficit, restore public buildings and even cut the crime rate. Proof of her popularity came when she was re-elected with ninety per cent of the vote. Although cynics might assume her success has something to do with her looks (indeed an Irene Saez doll is a big seller in the country) her supporters believe that she is that rare thing - a politician who really makes a difference to people's lives. The fact that she has the looks of a movie star is just an added bonus.

 

9. It's all a conspiracy!

 

In the 1997 film Conspiracy Theory, Mel Gibson plays Jerry Fletcher a New York cab driver obsessed with the idea of conspiracies — if it's not a plot to change thought patterns through water fluoridation, it's a secret plan to assassinate the President. The film was a box-office smash hit worldwide: perhaps a sign that there are many others who, even if they don't share Fletcher's extreme paranoia, at least identify with the idea that there is some kind of high-level conspiracy going on out there, and that we're all the victims of it. Access to the Internet, the international success of the paranormal thriller series The X-Files, which bases many of its stories around conspiracy theories, and acts of terroristr such as the Oklahoma bombing in 1995, have given conspiracy theories a wider audience than ever. Jonathan Vankin and John Whaler, authors of the best selling Sixty Greatest Conspiracies of All Time called the 1990s 'the conspiracy decade'.

Of course, conspiracy theories are nothing new: it's who is behind the conspiracy that changes with the times. Once upon a time it was the Freemasons, now seen by most people as a harmless semi-secret religious society, but two hundred years ago taken seriously enough to be banned all over Europe as an international conspiracy to overthrow monarchies and begin social revolution. In the United States in the 1950s, it was the turn of the communists, who were supposedly responsible for (among other things) rock and roll (a plot to destroy the moral health of young people), anc turning Hollywood into a Soviet propaganda machine. And where would the James Bond movies be without a whole succession of all-powerful mysterious figures striving for world domination?

With the communist 'threat' gone in the 1990s, encounters with UFOs now provide conspiracy theorists with their richest source of paranoia. We have become used to hearing tales of alien landings, like the one in Roswell, New Mexico ' 1948, the abduction of motorists on country roads late at night, and the inexplicable mutilation of cattle. This, according to conspiracy theorists, all has a perfectly logic if sinister, explanation.

According to former US intelligence man Milton William Cooper and his followers, there has been a kind of government within a government — the MJ12, or the Majestic Twelve — looking after the whole alien question since the 1950s, and keeping a whole lot of important information back from the poor ignorant public. The theoi is — wait for it — that MJ12 has done a deal with one or more alien races. You may have thought our rapid technological advances over the last decades were due tc lot of investment, research and a bit of human cleverness Sorry, all this technology was actually donated by gratefu aliens to MJ12. And in return for what? Well, that's where the cattle mutilations come in. All over the United States ; elsewhere, since the 1960s, there have been cases of catt being found, their internal organs removed with surgical precision and their blood sucked out. This — according t Cooper — is our part of the bargain. The aliens are apparently afflicted with some mysterious illness and ne< these spare cattle parts to cure them. If you find that one hard to believe, perhaps you'd prefer something a little closer to home. The mother of all conspiracy theories surrounds the assassination of Johr Kennedy in Dallas in 1962 (you can take your choice from the US Secret Service, the Mafia or even MJ12!), but simi theories have surrounded the deaths of Marilyn Monroe (possibly murdered at the orders of the US President), E Presley (he didn't really die, he just wanted to live like a regular person again), and even Diana, Princess of Wale; (supposedly a victim of MI6, the British Intelligence Servi It seems that any event nowadays can have a sinister explanation. When seven hundred Japanese children wei reported to have suffered epilepsy-like symptoms as a result of watching a cartoon squirrel with flashing eyes known as Pikachu, conspiracy theorists immediately claimed this was a new mind-control weapon being testi on Japanese youngsters! But don't worry. Even If the conspiracy theorists are right, you won't become a victii the great conspiracy just as long as you don't drive, eat, drink water, or watch TV. Better safe than sorry!

 

10. Five key questions about modern medical science

 

What exactly is cloning and do I need to worry about It?

Cloning is 'making a copy of a plant or animal by taking a cell from it and developing it artificially'. There is nothing new about this — plants were cloned in Ancient Greece over 2,000 years ago, and the first cloned frog appeared in 1968. But interest in cloning grew in 1997 when Dr Ian Wilmut and his colleagues from Edinburgh University announced the birth of the world's first cloned sheep, Dolly (some people pointed out that since all sheep look identical anyway, how could anyone tell?). However, many people were worried: what if the same techniques were used for some rich, elderly person to reinvent himself; or if an evil dictator produced hundreds of copies of himself in order to take over the world; or grieving relatives used cloning to bring their loved ones back to life?

The truth is that there is no chance that any copy of a human being would be identical either physically or mentally, any more than children are identical to their parents. The possible benefits of cloning, however, are numerous, for artificially producing human tissues and organs for transplant, and for preserving endangered animal species to name but two. Biologists have already genetically engineered headless frogs so i: may in future be possible to clone headless humans whose organs could be used for transplants. But would we want to?

How can transplants from other animals help humens?

In one famous case, a British girl born with a rare bone condition that left her with only one ear, had a new one grown for her at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in the USA. By taking cells from her existing ear and transplanting them onto the back of a mouse, scientists grew her another one, which could then be transplanted back. American scientists have also used sheep blood cells to make a universal blood which could be given to any patient, regardless of their blood group while British scientists are close to manufacturing artificial blood, with the aid of milk from genetically-altered cows and sheep.. Scientists have also transplanted monkeys' heads on to new bodies, paving the way for head transplants to be performed on humans. The monkeys were able to eat, drink and sleep normally. Robert White, head of neurosurgery at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio said the operation could be available to humans within thirty years, but the experiment has been condemned as an example of 'the disastrous route Western medicine is taking, in which prolonging individual life takes precedence over everything'.

 

How can transplants from other animals help humens?

In one famous case, a British girl born with a rare bone condition that left her with only one ear, had a new one grown for her at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in the USA. By taking cells from her existing ear and transplanting them onto the back of a mouse, scientists grew her another one, which could then be transplanted back. American scientists have also used sheep blood cells to make a universal blood which could be given to any patient, regardless of their blood group while British scientists are close to manufacturing artificial blood, with the aid of milk from genetically-altered cows and sheep.. Scientists have also transplanted monkeys' heads on to new bodies, paving the way for head transplants to be performed on humans. The monkeys were able to eat, drink and sleep normally. Robert White, head of neurosurgery at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio said the operation could be available to humans within thirty years, but the experiment has been condemned as an example of 'the disastrous route Western medicine is taking, in which prolonging individual life takes precedence over everything'.

Are we any nearer a cure for cancer or AIDS?

Although a definitive cure for cancer seems as elusive as ever, scientists have produced an impressive list of things that might help prevent it: green tea, green salads, brazil nuts, spinach, kidneys, mushrooms, and even lipstick. And although no cure has yet been found for AIDS, extraordinary advances have been made in its treatment. Drugs called protease inhibitors can halt and perhaps even reverse the progress of the virus in the patient's body, so it may be that AIDS will soon no longer be an incurable disease. The problem is the expense: a course of treatment costs many thousands of dollars, and so will do nothing to stop the epidemic in poor countries, where the money would be better spent on preventing malaria, cholera and tuberculosis.

So what can we cure nowadays?

If you're a grey-haired, balding, colour-blind man who snores, there may be good news on the horizon. A doctor in England has announced that by adding a small amount of pigment to an ordinary pair of glasses he has been able to cure colour-blindness (though he admits he has no idea why it works!). A drug has been tested on dogs which stimulates muscles in their upper airway, thus stopping them from snoring. If it works for them, why not on humans? To prevent grey hair, a special shampoo has been developed that fools pigment cells into producing melanin, which gives hair its colour, and there may now even be a cure for baldness: a pill which reduces levels of the hormone dihydrotesterone, although there may be a less desirable side effect of a decreased interest in sex.

Why would anyone want to implant a computer chip into a human brain?

Could it be possible for all the things you need to know to be implanted in your brain on a silicon chip? Doctors at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany claim to have found a way of connecting nerve cells to a silicon chip. Such implants — which have so far only been successful in rats — could be used to restore vision to people who have become blind or repair nerve damage after a stroke, but also to increase human intelligence. In theory, chips could be programmed to include all the knowledge a human being is likely to need during their life, so eliminating the need for school work!

 

 

11. Dostoyevsky Impasse

When you ask a foreigner what Russian writers they know, arguably, the first name to come to their mind would be that of Dostoyevsky - alongside Tolstoy and, probably, someone else. Still, relatively few people must have actually read any of his works, despite the numerous translations into dozens of foreign languages.

No surprise - even in your native language it is quite difficult to move through the author's winding and, sometimes, clumsy sentences. I re­mem­­ber how struck I was some ten years ago when I saw an American college guy, whose interests were very far from Russian literary classics, reading a paperback edition of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Even more striking to me was to hear from him that he was actually enjoying it.

I had struggled through the book when I was supposed to read it as part of the mandatory reading curriculum in Russian literature in high school. Although later I came to realize how important he is for Russian literature, I would never think that many people would really enjoy reading his works.

For my generation, as well as for the younger ones, Dostoyevsky has beco­me something like a bronze statue, a classical author whose importance most people recognize but whose books don't say much to a contemporary reader. Not surprisingly, for many people these days, the name of the author is largely associated not with his own novels, but with all kinds of postmodernist remakes and references.

Among those are Vladimir Sorokin's play Dostoyevsky Trip, in which the popular contemporary writer and playwright approaches Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot with an entire arsenal of postmodernist tools, or - on a more mass-market level - Roman Kacha­nov's 1990s movie Down House, a remake of the same novel, set in present time.

It is difficult to disagree with the organizers of the musical and literary "Dostoevsky Festival" which recently took place in Moscow to celebrate the publication of the book Dostoyevsky Without Gloss, when they say that too many stereotypes have been attached to the writer's name in the years since his death. "Dostoyevsky is something bigger than a maniac with an axe or the movie Down House," they said, and there's nothing to say against that. Another issue is whether it is really possible to dissipate stereotypes and present Dostoyevsky to readers without his recent pop cultural interpretation. And would that really make sense, after all?

All the "gloss" or, as I would rather put it, "bronze paint" that has been attached to the author's image and needs to be "scraped off" is still part of contemporary mass culture. Whatever a present-day reader could learn about Dostoyevsky, that would hardly be able to change their perceptions of the writer. Only turning to his books and reading or rereading them could a contemporary reader learn what they are really about, but not many would be genuinely interested in doing that.

Integration of classic literature and other forms of culture into the modern cultural context is always a difficult issue. Times have changed dramatically since all those classical works, including Dostoyevsky's, were created. Introducing them to today's audiences inevitably means stereotyping and simplification. There's no way round it. Either Dostoyevsky becomes part of popular culture, with all clichés attached, or he remains an author everyone knows but few would want to read.

 

12. Mikhalkov Delivers

 

Recently it turned out that Russia's nominee for the Academy Awards or the Oscars of the year 2008 is film "12" by Nikita Mikhalkov. The decision was made by the Oscar Commission of Russia, which had to choose amongst 9 films, including "Wolfhound" by Nikolai Lebedev, "Expulsion" by Andrei Zviagincev, "Artiste" by Stanislav Govorukhin.

Mikhalkov's film has already been awarded several awards: the prestigious Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and the Golden Amvrosi in Milan. Notwithstanding Mikhalkov's directing abilities, much of the film's success is due to the plot: 12 jurors must decide the fate of a young Chechen boy who is accused of murdering his Russian step-father. The main action takes place in a rundown school gym.

During the deliberations, the characters of the twelve jurors are given the full court press. Each character belongs to different social strata, and they talk individually about their own experiences and personal world views. The ensuing debates help foreign audiences and even Russians to understand the alleged riddle of the Russian mentality, which is "incomprehensible by the mind".

For eight years Mikhalkov has kept out of the public spotlight so this work caused no small sensation: in its opening week it pulled in more than 2 million dollars.

But this was just the first step for an Oscar , we will learn whether "12" is one of the five rivals for the "Best Foreign Language Film" or not. On February 24, the film may win an award at the Oscar ceremony.

Mikhalkov, already known by the Com­mission, is said to have better than average chances for winning. He is no stranger to Oscar ceremonies: "Close to Eden" was nominated in 1992, while "Burnt by the Sun" (1994) took home the Oscar. So Mikhalkov won't be treated as a rookie. However, "12" is a version of "12 Angry Men" by Sidney Lumet, which got the "Golden Bear" in 1957. This fact may ruin the film's chances of winning the award.

Participation in such an event shows the big strides that Russian film is once again making in the world.

 

Globalization

 

Globalization, also globalisation, refers to a process of increasing global connectivity and integration between nation-states, households or individuals, corporations and other organizations. It is an umbrella term referring to increased interdependence in the economic, social, technological, cultural, political, and ecological spheres. In the context of global trade, the term globalisation is the opposite of protectionism. Theodore Levitt is usually credited with globalisation's first use in an economic context.

Definition

A number of definitions abound, but all generally note the increasing connectivity of markets, economies, and ways of life across the world. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that globalization is the "process by which the experience of everyday life ... is becoming standardized around the world."

In economic terms, a broad definition is that globalization is the worldwide process of homogenizing prices, products, wages, rates of interest and profits. Globalization relies on three forces for development: the role of human migration, international trade, and rapid movements of capital and integration of financial markets. The International Monetary Fund stresses the growing economic interdependence of countries worldwide through increasing volume and variety of cross-border transactions ... free international capital flows, and more rapid and widespread diffusion of technology.

While some scholars and observers of globalization stress convergence of patterns of production and consumption and a resulting homogenization of culture, others stress that globalization has the potential to take many diverse forms. Globalization is perhaps best understood as a unitary process inclusive of many sub-processes (such as enhanced economic interdependence, increased cultural influence, rapid advances of information technology, and novel governance and geo-political challenges) that are increasingly binding people and the biosphere more tightly into one global system with one destiny. In this context the global economy has grown rapidly, yet poverty persists, inequality increases, and global environmental degradation deepens.