Unit one: Born to Surf
The web magazine From the Window contains poetry and literature from well-know writers across the global. There are thoughtful articles analyzing the state of the world we live in. There is even a piece from the Secretary General of the United States, Kofi Annan. It may come as some surprise to find out that the editor of the magazine is a 12-year-old girl, Joy Nightingale.
From the window won Joy Nightingale the prize in the 1999 childnet international and Cable and Wireless awards. These are given annually for the best use of the Internet by and for young people. And they highlight one of the most welcoming aspects of the virtual world. Children have taken to the Internet as though they are born surfing.
Perhaps this is because adults have had to change their understanding of technology while children simply accept it as natural. Whatever the reason, children can be found building websites an E-mailing friends across the world while adults are still asking:” Tell me again-where exactly is cyberspace？”
Of course there is growing concern about the fact that Children can travel far away from parental supervision in cyberspace. In response, many parents have installed software packages which pervert access to violent or pornographic websites. Childnet is taking a more positive line. The website is a gateway to a world of education and entertainment.
The rapid growth in Internet culture has led analysts to speculate that society will soon be divided between the “information rich” and “information poor”. For Childnet it is especially important hat children at the margins of society through poverty or disability have the chance to take their place as equal citizens in the virtual world.
Unit three:
When 1998 began, East Africa should have been at its most beautiful: normally the short rainy season ends in December, the rivers subside, and the country sparkles; farmers raise crops, animals graze, tourists go on safaris. But this year was different. The rains were heavy and long. The water spread out for miles in places in Kanya and Somalia, cutting off villages and forcing herders to crowd with their livestock onto a few patches of dry land. Things quickly turned ugly. Camels, cows, sheep, and goats all stared dying of violent fevers. Some people, too, began to get sick. Some went temporarily blind; others began bleeding uncontrollably.
The disease was Rift Valley fever, caused by an obscure mosquitoborne virus. It pops up every few years in Africa when standing water encourages mosquitoeggs to hatch-this year’s huge floods brought a spectacular outbreak. According to official estimates, at least 89,000 people caught the disease. Two hundred died, but then the disease is not usually fatal to humans. Animal losses, however, were almost certainly vast-owners reported losing up to 90 percent of their herds.
Yet catastrophic as the East Africa floods were, they had to jostle for the world’s attention with other cases of strange weather-with unusual occurrences of droughts, fires rains, cold snaps, and heat waves. Every year brings its own grab bag of such anomalies, but this year many of them could be linked to a phenomenon in the empty expanses of the equatorial Pacific-a change in the ocean currents and winds that began in the early months of 1997 and that altered weather patterns around the world. The change in the weather was, of course, the work of El Nino. By the end of 1997, El Nino had already become a celebrity of sorts. In 1998,
however, El Nino’s effects on the world came into full flower. It helped make the
year the hottest ever recorded. In addition to Rift Valley fever, El Nino has been linked to an upsurge in diseases ranging from cholera to malaria to dengue fever, in Kenya, Cambodia, Peru, and other countries scattered around the globe.
Unit five:
It is an astonishing fact that there are laws of nature, rules that summarize conveniently-not just qualitatively but quantitatively-however the world works. We might imagine a universe in which there are no such laws, in which the 1080 elementary particles that make up a universe like our own behave with utter and uncompromising abandon. To understand such a universe we would need a brain at least as massive as the universe. It seems unlikely that such a universe could have life and intelligence, because beings and brains require some degree of internal stability and order. But even if in a much more random universe there were such beings with an intelligence much greater than our own, there could not be much knowledge, passion or joy.
Fortunately for us, we live in a universe that has at least important parts that are
knowable. Our common-sense experience and our evolutionary history have prepared us to understand something of the workaday world. When we go into
other realms, however, common sense and ordinary intuition turn out to be highly
unreliable guides. It is stunning that as we go close to the speed of light our mass increases indefinitely, we shrink toward zero thickness in the direction of
motion, and time for us comes as near to stopping as we would like. Many people think that this is silly, and every week or two I get a letter from someone who complains to me about it. But it is virtually certain consequence not just of experiment but also of Albert Einstein’s brilliant analysis of space and time called Theory of Relativity. It does not matter that these effects seem unreasonable to us. We are not in the habit of traveling close to the speed of light. The testimony of our common sense is suspect at high velocities.
The idea that the world places restrictions on what humans might do is frustrating. Why shouldn’t we be able to have intermediate rotational positions? Why can’t we travel faster than the speed of light? But so far as we can tell, this is the way the universe is constructed. Such prohibitions not only press us toward a little humility; they also make the world more knowable.
Unit seven:
I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one’s entire life. Even the expression “Be a man!” strikes me as insulting and abusive. It means: Be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient and soldierly, and stop thinking. An means” manly” -how can one think” about men” without considering the terrible ambition of manliness? And yet it is part of every man’s life. It is a hideous and crippling lie; it not only insists on difference and connives at superiority, it is also by its very nature destructive-emotionally damaging and socially harmful.
The youth who is subverted, as most are, into believing in the masculine ideal is effectively separated from women-it is the most savage tribal logic-and he spends the rest of his life finding women a riddle and a nuisance. Of course, there is a female version of this male affliction. It begins with mothers encouraging little girls to say (to other adults), “Do you like my new dress?” In a sense, girls are traditionally urged to please adults with a kind of coquettishness, while boys are enjoined to behave like monkeys toward each other. The 9-year-old coquette proceeds to become womanish in a subtle power game in which she learns to be sexually indispensable, socially decorative and always alert to a man’s sense of inadequacy. Femininity-being ladylike-implies needing a man as witness and seducer; but masculinity celebrates the exclusive company of men. That is why it is so grotesque; and that is also why there is no manliness without inadequacy-because it denies men the natural friendship of women.
It is very hard to imagine any concept of manliness that does not belittle women, and it begins very early. At an age when I wanted to meet girls-let’s say the treacherous years lf 13 to 16-I was told to take up a sport, get more fresh air, join the Boy Scouts, and I was urged not to read so much.
Unit Eight:
Late next century, when scholars are scripting the definitive history of the PC, these last few years of high-octane growth may actually be depicted as the Dark Ages. Historians will marvel at how we toiled in front of monolithic, beige BUBs (big ugly boxes), suffering under the oppressive glare of cathode-ray tubes while our legs scraped against the 30-pound towers beneath our desks.
They may also mark 1999 as the start of the PC renaissance, when manufacturers finally started to get it: design matters. This holiday season, computer shoppers will
enjoy unprecedented variety in shapes, sizes and colors-and not just in Apple’s
groundbreaking line of translucent iMacs and iBooks. Nearly every major PC maker now has innovative desktop designs on the way to market, from hourglass-sculpted towers to flat-panel displays with all the processing innards packed into the base. Among industrial designers, who still think the PC has a long way before you’ll want to display it on your mantle, the only question is, what took so long?” the PC industry has ridiculed design for a long time,” says Hartmut Esslinger, founder of Frog Design. “They have not respected their customers and have underestimated their desires.”
PC makers are finally catching on-and it’s partly out of desperation. Manufacturers
used to sell computers by trumpeting their techno bells and whistles, like processor
speed and memory. But since ever-faster chips have given us more power on the desktop than we could ever possible use, computer makers have been competing on price-astrategy that has dropped most units below $1,000 and slashed profits. Last week IBM limped from the battlefield, announcing it would pull its lagging Aptiva line from store shelves and sell it only on the Web. Competing only on proce”made an industry shakeout inevitable”, says Nick Donatiello, president of the marketing-research firm Odyssey.
Unit Nine:
A symbol is not the same thing as a sign; that is a fact that psychologists and philosophers often overlook. All intelligent animals use signs, so do we. To them as well as to us sounds and smells and motions ae signs of food, danger the presence of other beings, or of rain or storm. Furthermore some animals not only attend to signs but also produce them for the benefits of others. Dogs bark at the doo to be let in; rabbits thump to call each other; the cooing of doves and the growl of wolf are unequivocal signs of feelings and intentions to be reckoned with by other creatures.
We use signs just as animals do, though with considerably more elaboration. We stop at red lights and go on green; we answer calls and bells, watch the sky for coming storms, read trouble or promise or anger in each other’s eye. That is animal intelligence raised to the human level. Those of us who are dog lovers can probably all tell wonderful stories of how high our dogs have sometimes risen in the scale of clever sign interpretation and sign using.
A sign anything that announces the existence or the imminence of some events, the presence of a thing or a person, or a change in the state of affairs. There are signs of the weather, signs of danger, signs of future good or evil, signs of what the past has been. In every case a sign is closely bound up with something to be noted or
expected in experience. It is always a part of the situation to which it refers,
though the reference may be remote in space and time.
A symbol differs from a sign in that it does not announce the presence of the object, the being, condition, but merely brings this thing to mind. A sign causes us to think or act in face of the thing signified, whereas a symbol causes us to think about the thing symbolized. A sign is always embedded in reality, but a symbol may be
divorced from reality altogether. It may refer to a mere idea, a figment, or a dream.
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