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Strangeness in Our Midst?

The hot early universe or colliding neutron stars may have coughed up so-called strange quark matter, an extremely dense mix of up, down and strange quarks. If they exist, wayfaring nuggets of strange matter might pierce the earth every few years, and, like stones dropped in water, trigger seismic ripples in their wake. Because a strange nugget would far outpace sound underground, seismographs would record it as a simultaneous tremble from many points along a line. Careful sifting through one million seismic reports between 1990 and 1993 revealed one set of reports from November 1993 that has the right properties for a nugget strike, say Vigdor L. Teplitz and his colleagues at Southern Methodist University. Corroborating the result would require scrutinizing new readings in nearly real time. The findings appear in the December 2003 Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

A> Текст 2. Сделайте письменный перевод двух давних публикаций журнала "Scientific Атепсап".Отредактируйте ваш перевод, учитывая нормы русского языка. November 1853

WHAT IS HEAT? - "What do we know of heat as a substance? Has any man seen it with his eyes, handled it with his hands (like a stone) or weighed it in a balance? No. We have no positive proofs then that it exists as matter at all. and know nothing about it as such: but as a quality belonging to all matter, and developed under certain conditions, we know a great deal. Heat is the property with which the Great Creator has endowed all matter, the same as he has endowed all matter with the quality of gravity." December 1903

PLANE FLIGHT -"On December 17, Messrs. Orville and Wilbur Wright made some successful experiments at Kitty Hawk, N.C., with an aeroplane propelled by a 16 - horsepower, four-cylinder, gasoline motor, and weighing complete more than 700 pounds. The aerplane was started from the top of a 100-foot sand dune. After it was pushed off, it at first glided downward near the surface of the incline. Then, as the propellers gained speed, the aeroplane rose steadily in the air to a height of about 60 feet, after which it was driven a distance of some three miles against a twenty-

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mile-an-hour wind at a speed of about eight miles an hour. Mr. Wilbur Wright was able to land on a spot he selected, without hurt to himself or the machine. This is a decided step in advance in aerial navigation with aeroplanes."

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Micro

Hardly a week goes by without some advance in technology that would have seemed incredible 50 years ago. Over the past 20 years computers have completely revolutionized our lives. Yet we can expect the rate of change to accelerate rather than slow down within our lifetimes. The next 25 years will see as many changes as have been witnessed in the past 150.

These developments in technology are bound to have a dramatic effect on the future of work. By 2010. new technology will have revolutionized communications. People will be transmitting messages down telephone lines that previously would have been sent by post. A postal system which has essentially been the same since the Pharaohs will virtually disappear overnight. Once these changes are introduced, not only postmen but also clerks and secretaries will vanish in a paper-free society. All the routine tasks they perform will be carried on a tiny silicon chip. As soon as this technology is available, these people will be as obsolete as the horse and cart after the invention of the motor car. One change will make thousands, if not millions, redundant.

Even people in traditional professions, where expert knowledge has been the key, are unlikely to escape the effects of new technology. Instead of going to a solicitor, you might go to a computer which is programmed with all the most up-to-date legal information. Indeed, you might even come up before a computer judge who would, in all probability, judge your case more fairly than a human counterpart. Doctors, too, will find that an electronic competitor will be able to cany out a much quicker and more accurate diagnosis and recommend more efficient courses of treatment.

In education, teachers will be largely replaced by teaching machines far more knowledgeable than any human being. What's more, most

learning will take place in the home via video conferencing. Children will still go to school though, until another place is created where they can make friends and develop social skills through play.

What, you may ask. can we do to avoid the threat of the dole queue? Is there any job that will be safe? First of all, we shouldn't hide our heads in the sand. Unions will try to stop change but they will be fighting a losing battle. People should get computer literate as this just might save them from professional extinction. After all, there will be a few jobs left in law, education and medicine for those few individuals who are capable of writing and programming the software of the future. Strangely enough, there will still be jobs like rubbish collection and cleaning as it is tough to programme tasks which are largely unpredictable.

If we accept that people have the need to work, then an option might well be to introduce compulsory job sharing and to limit the length of the working week. Otherwise, we could find ourselves in an explosive situation where a technocratic elite is both supporting and threatened by vast numbers of the unemployed. Whether the future is one of mass unemployment or greater freedom and leisure will depend on how change is managed over this difficult period and how the relationship between work and reward is viewed.

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RF1D - A key to Automating Everything

"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. "

Thirteen years ago, in an article for scientific American the late Mark Weiser outlined his bold vision of "ubiquitous computing": small computers would be embedded in everyday objects all around us and. using wireless connections, would respond to our presence, desires and needs without being actively manipulated. This network of mobile and fixed devices would do things for us automatically and so invisibly that we

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would notice, only their effects. Weiser called such systems "calm technology." because they would make it easier for us to focus on our work and other activities, instead of demanding that we interact with and control them, as the typical PC does today.

In a home equipped with this kind of technology, readers strategically placed in the bedroom, the bathroom door frame, the stairwell and the refrigerator would detect the identifying data in microchip tags sewn into your clothes and embedded in the packaging data to a home computer, which would take action based on that information.

The computer would notice as you got out of bed in the morning and would switch on the coffeemaker. As you entered the bathroom, the shower would come on. adjusted to your favorite temperature. When you started down the stairs, the preloaded toaster would heat up so that your breakfast would be done just the way you like it. When you opened the refrigerator, the appliance would remind you that you were out of milk and that the tub of coleslaw inside had passed its expiration date and should be thrown out.

Today systems based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology are helping to move Weiser's vision closer to reality. These systems consist of tags (small silicon chips that contain identifying data and sometimes other information) and of readers that automatically receive and decode that data.

The responsive RFID home-and conference room, office building and car-are still far away, but RFID technology is already in limited use. The tags, often as small as a grain of rice, now hide in ID cards and wristbands, windshield-mounted toll tags, gasoline quick-purchase tokens, and electronic ear tags for livestock, and they have begun to appear in auto key-chain antitheft devices, toys (Hasbro Star Wars figures) and other products. They have also timed runners in road races, and last year a company in Mexico began a service to implant tags under the skin of children as an antikidnapping measure..

In the near term. RFID tags will probably be found in airline luggage labels (British Airways has conducted extensive trials), and they may eventually be embedded in paper currency to inhibit counterfeiters and enable governments to track the movement of cash. (Hitachi in Japan recently announced that it has developed tags minute enough for this application.) Meanwhile the retail, security, transportation, manufacturing and shipping industries are all testing or starting to implement sophisticated RFID applications.

But the RFID revolution is not without a downside: the technology's growth raises important social issues, and as RFID systems proliferate, we will be forced to address new problems related to privacy, law and etiiics. Controversy has already erupted: in mid-2003 two major retailers-Wal-Mart in the U.S. and the international clothing maker Benetton- canceled large-scale tests of in-store RFID-centered inventory control systems apparently partly as a response to public reactions that raised the specter of wholesale monitoring of citizens through tags embedded in consumer products.

The Inside Story

RFID technology is based on the simple idea that an electronic circuit in an unpowered. or "passive," tag - which requires no batteries or maintenance - can be intermittently powered from a distance by a reader device that broadcasts energy to it. So powered, the tag exchanges information with the reader. Tags essentially consist of a plain antenna bonded to a silicon chip and encapsulated inside a glass or plastic module.

Tags operate differently depending on several factors, especially the frequency at which they function. Initially RFID tags worked only at frequency bands of 13.56 megahertz or lower. Such tags, which are still the most widely used, typically need to be less than a meter away from a reader and offer poor discrimination (a reader cannot quickly interpret a multitude of individual tags grouped closely together).

More sophisticated, higher-frequency tags now enable a reader to quickly identify many individual tags grouped together, even haphazardly-although they are not yet able to distinguish perfectly among all the items in a loaded grocery-cart. (The ability to swiftly and reliably scan a shopping cart full of jumbled, closely spaced RFID-tagged items is a major aim of this technology. Once perfected, such RFID scanning should streamline inventory and checkout procedures and save millions of dollars for retailers.)

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а. переведите слова и словосочетания: to an extent, enhance, infinite options, cereal, assumption, to be consistent with (согласовываться), assessment, well-being (здоровье), findings, account for, misery, insight, in particular, propensity, prone, settle for second best, evaluate, brood, ruminate

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b. переведите термины maximizer и satisficer.

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