In the college-admissions wars, we parents are the true fights. We’re pushing our kids to get good grades, take SAT preparatory courses and build resumes so they can get into the college of our first choice. I’ve twice been to the wars, and as I survey the battlefield, something different is happening. We see our kids’ college background as a prize demonstrating how well we’ve raised them. But we can’t acknowledge that our obsession(痴迷) is more about us than them. So we’ve contrived various justifications that turn out to be half-truths, prejudices or myths. It actually doesn’t matter much whether Aaron and Nicole go to Stanford.
We have a full-blown prestige panic; we worry that there won’t be enough prizes to go around. Fearful parents urge their children to apply to more schools than ever. Underlying the hysteria(歇斯底里) is the belief that scarce elite degrees must be highly valuable. Their graduates must enjoy more success because they get a better education and develop better contacts. All that is plausible—and mostly wrong. We haven’t found any convincing evidence that selectivity or prestige matters. Selective schools don’t systematically employ better instructional approaches than less selective schools. On two measures—professors’ feedback and the number of essay exams selective schools do slightly worse.
By some studies, selective schools do enhance their graduates’ lifetime earnings. The gain is reckoned at 2-4% for every 100-poinnt increase in a school’s average SAT scores. But even this advantage is probably a statistical fluke(偶然). A well-known study examined students who got into highly selective schools and then went elsewhere. They earned just as much as graduates from higher-status schools.
Kids count more than their colleges. Getting into Yale may signify intelligence, talent and ambition. But it’s not the only indicator and, paradoxically, its significance is declining. The reason: so many similar people go elsewhere. Getting into college is not life’s only competition. In the next competition—the job market and graduate school—the results may change. Old-boy networks are breaking down. Princeton economist Alan Krueger studied admissions to one top Ph.D. program. High scores on the GRE helped explain who got in; degrees of prestigious universities didn’t.
So, parents, lighten up. The stakes have been vastly exaggerated. Up to a point, we can rationalize our pushiness. America is a competitive society; our kids need to adjust to that. But too much pushiness can be destructive. The very ambition we impose on our children may get some into Harvard but may also set them up for disappointment. One study found that, other things being equal, graduates of highly selective schools experienced more job dissatisfaction. They may have been so conditioned to being on top that anything less disappoints.
What Will the World Be Like in Fifty Years?
This week some top scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, gave their vision of how the world will look in 2056, from gas-powered cars to extraordinary health advances, John Ingham reports on what the world’s finest minds believe our futures will be.
For those of us lucky enough to live that long, 2056 will be a world of almost perpetual youth, where obesity is a remote memory and robots become our companions.
We will be rubbing shoulders with aliens and colonising outer space. Better still, our descendants might at last live in a world at peace with itself.
The prediction is that we will have found a source of inexhaustible, safe, green energy, and that science will have killed off religion. If they are right we will have removed two of the main causes of war-our dependence on oil and religious prejudice.
Will we really, as today’s scientists claim, be able to live for ever or at least cheat the ageing process so that the average person lives to 150?
Of course, all these predictions come with a scientific health warning. Harvard professor Steven Pinker says: “This is an invitation to look foolish, as with the predictions of domed cities and nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners that were made 50 year ago.”
Living longer
Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute in North Carolina, believes failing organs will be repaired by injecting cells into the body. They will naturally go straight to the injury and help heal it. A system of injections without needles could also slow the ageing process by using the same process to “tune” cells.
Bruce Lahn, professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago, anticipates the ability to produce “unlimited supplies” of transplantable human organs without the need for human donors. These organs would be grown in animals such as pigs. When a patient needed a new organ, such as a kidney, the surgeon would contact a commercial organ producer, give him the patient’s immunological profile and would then be sent a kidney with the correct tissue type.
These organs would be entirely composed of human cells, grown by introducing them into animal hosts, and allowing them to develop into an organ in place of the animal’s own. But Prof. Lahn believes that farmed brains would be “off limits”. He says: “Very few people would want to have their brains replaced by someone else’s and we probably don’t want to put a human brain in an animal body.”
Richard Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan, thinks scientist could develop “authentic anti-ageing drugs” by working out how cells in larger animals such as whales and human resist many forms of injuries. He says: “It is now routine, in laboratory mammals, to extend lifespan by about 40%. Turning on the same protective systems in people should, by 2056, create the first class of 100-year-olds who are as vigorous and productive as today’s people in their 60s”
Aliens
Colin Pillinger, professor of planetary sciences at the Open University, says: I fancy that at least we will be able to show that life did start to evolve on Mars well as Earth.” Within 50years he hopes scientists will prove that alien life came here in Martian meteorites (陨石).
Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. believes that in 50 years we may find evidence of alien life in the ancient permanent frost of Mars or on other planers.
He adds: There is even a chance we will find alien life forms here on Earth. It might be as different as English is to Chinese.
Princeton professor Freeman Dyson thinks it “likely” that life form outer space will be discovered before 2056 because the tools for finding it, such as optical and radio detection and data processing, are improving.
He says: “As soon as the first evidence is found, we will know what to look for and additional discoveries are likely to follow quickly. Such discoveries are likely to have revolutionary consequences for biology, astronomy and philosophy. They may also change the way we look at ourselves and our place in the universe.”
Colonies in space
Richard Gott, professor of astrophysics at Princeton, hopes man will set up a self-sufficient colony on Mars, which would be a “life insurance policy against whatever catastrophes, natural or otherwise, might occur on Earth.
“The real space race is whether we will colonise off Earth on to other worlds before money for the space programme runs out.”
Spinal injuries
Ellen Heber-Katz, a professor at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, foresees cures for injuries causing paralysis such as the one that afflicted Superman star Christopher Reeve.
She says: “I believe that the day is not far off when we will be able to prescribe drugs that cause severed (断裂的) spinal cords to heal, hearts to regenerate and lost limbs to regrow.”
“People will come to expect that injured or diseased organs are meant to be repaired from within, in much the same way that we fix an appliance or automobile: by replacing the damaged part with a manufacturer-certified new part.” She predicts that within 5 to 10 years fingers and toes will be regrown and limbs will start to be regrown a few years later. Repairs to the nervous system will start with optic nerves and, in time, the spinal cord.” Within 50 years whole body replacement will be routine,” Prof. Heber-Katz adds.
Obesity
Sydney Brenner, senior distinguished fellow of the Crick-Jacobs Center in California, won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Medicine and says that if there is a global disaster some humans will survive-and evolution will favor small people with bodies large enough to support the required amount of brain power.” Obesity,” he says.” will have been solved.”
Robots
Rodney Brooks, professor of robotics at MIT, says the problems of developing artificial intelligence for robots will be at least partly overcome. As a result, “the possibilities for robots working with people will open up immensely”
Energy
Bill Joy, green technology expert in California, says:” The most significant breakthrough would be to have an inexhaustible source of safe, green energy that is substantially cheaper than any existing energy source.”
Ideally, such a source would be safe in that it could not be made into weapons and would not make hazardous or toxic waste or carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.
Society
Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, says: The US will follow the UK in realizing that religion is not a prerequisite (前提)for ordinary human decency.
“This, science will kill religion-not by reason challenging faith but by offering a more practical, universal and rewarding moral framework for human interaction.”
He also predicts that “absurdly wasteful” displays of wealth will become unfashionable while the importance of close-knit communities and families will become clearer.
These three changes, he says, will help make us all” brighter, wiser, happier and kinder”.
Imagine waking up and finding the value of your assets has been halved. No, you’re not an investor in one of those hedge funds that failed completely. With the dollar slumping to a 26-year low against the pound, already-expensive London has become quite unaffordable. A coffee at Starbucks, just as unavoidable in England as it is in the United States, runs about $8.
The once all-powerful dollar isn’t doing a Titanic against just the pound. It is sitting at a record low against the euro and at a 30-year low against the Canadian dollar. Even the Argentine peso and Brazilian real are thriving against the dollar.
The weak dollar is a source of humiliation, （屈辱），for a nation’s self-esteem rests in part on the strength of its currency. It’s also a potential economic problem, since a declining dollar makes imported food more expensive and exerts upward pressure on interest rates. And yet there are substantial sectors of the vast U.S. economy-from giant companies like Coca-Cola to mom-and-pop restaurant operators in Miami-for which the weak dollar is most excellent news.
Many Europeans may view the U.S. as an arrogant superpower that has become hostile to foreigners. But nothing makes people think more warmly of the U.S. than a weak dollar. Through April, the total number of visitors from abroad was up 6.8 percent from last year. Should the trend continue, the number of tourists this year will finally top the 2000 peak? Many Europeans now apparently view the U.S. the way many Americans view Mexico-as a cheap place to vacation, shop and party, all while ignoring the fact that the poorer locals can’t afford to join the merrymaking.
The money tourists spend helps decrease our chronic trade deficit. So do exports, which thanks in part to the weak dollar, soared 11 percent between May 2006 and May 2007. For first five months of 2007, the trade deficit actually fell 7 percent from 2006.
If you own shares in large American corporations, you’re a winner in the weak-dollar gamble. Last week Coca-Cola’s stick bubbled to a five-year high after it reported a fantastic quarter. Foreign sales accounted for 65 percent of Coke’s beverage （饮料）business. Other American companies profiting from this trend include McDonald’s and IBM.
American tourists, however, shouldn’t expect any relief soon. The dollar lost strength the way many marriages break up-slowly, and then all at once. And currencies don’t turn on a dime. So if you want to avoid the pain inflicted by the increasingly pathetic dollar, cancel that summer vacation to England and look to New England. There, the dollar is still treated with a little respect.
We can say a lot of things about those ________________(毕生致力于诗歌的人): they are passionate, impulsive, and unique.
If movie trailers(预告片)are supposed to cause a reaction, the preview for "United 93" more than succeeds. Featuring no famous actors, it begins with images of a beautiful morning and passengers boarding an airplane. It takes you a minute to realize what the movie’s even about. That’s when a plane hits the World Trade Center. the effect is visceral(震撼心灵的). When the trailer played before "Inside Man" last week at a Hollywood theater, audience members began calling out, "Too soon!" In New York City, the response was even more dramatic. The Loews theater in Manhattan took the rare step of pulling the trailer from its screens after several complaints.
United 93 is the first feature film to deal explicitly with the events of September 11, 2001, and is certain to ignite an emotional debate. Is it too soon? Should the film have been made at all? More to the point, will anyone want to see it? Other 9/11 projects are on the way as the fifth anniversary of the attacks approaches, most notably Oliver Stone's " World Trade Center." but as the forerunner, “United 93” will take most of the heat, whether it deserves it or not.
The real United 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field after 40 passengers and crew fought back against the terrorists. Writer-director Paul Greengrass has gone to great lengths to be respectful in his depiction of what occurred, proceeding with the film only after securing the approval of every victim's family. "Was I surprised at the agreement? Yes. Very. Usually there’re one or two families who're more reluctant," Greengrass writes in an e-mail. "I was surprised at the extraordinary way the United 93 families have welcomed us into their lives and shared their experiences with us." Carole O'Hare, a family member, says, “They were very open and honest with us, and they made us a part of this whole project.” Universal, which is releasing the film, plans to donate 10% of its opening weekend gross to the Flight 93 National Memorial Fund. That hasn't stopped criticism that the studio is exploiting a national tragedy. O’Hare thinks that’s unfair. “This story has to be told to honor the passengers and crew for what they did,” she says. “But more than that, it raises awareness. Our ports aren’t secure. Our borders aren’t secure. Our airlines still aren’t secure, and this is what happens when you’re not secure. That’s the message I want people to hear.”