Английский язык (Магистратура). Учебное пособие

… We already are an information society. The need for an increasingly technologically oriented work force for the 21st century, competent in computing, mathematics and information technology,

Portrait of a multitasking mind

What happens when you try to do three things at once?

Are you a media multitasker? We know you're reading the article, but what else are you doing right now? Take a quick inventory: Are you also listening to music? Monitoring the progress of a sports game on TV? Emailing your co-worker? Texting your friend? If your inventory has revealed a multitasking lifestyle, you are not alone. Media multitasking is increasingly common, to the extent that some have dubbed today’s teens "Generation M."

People often think of the ability to multitask as a positive attribute, to the degree that they will proudly tout their ability to multitask.

while you’re driving and talking on the phone with your mother? However, new research by EyalOphir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner at Stanford University suggests that people who multitask suffer from a problem: weaker self-control ability.

The researchers asked hundreds of college students fill out a survey on their use of 12 different types of media. Students reported not only the number of hours per week that they used each type of

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media, but also rated how often they used each type of media simultaneously with each other type of media. The researchers created a score for each person that reflected how much their lifestyle incorporated mediamultitasking.

They then recruited people who had scores that were extremely high or low and asked them perform a series of tests designed to measure the ability to control one's attention, one's responses, and the contents of one's memory. They found that the highand lowmediamultitasking groups were equally able to control their responses, but that the heavy media-multitasking group had difficulties, compared to the low media-multitasking group, when asked to ignore information that was in the environment or in their recent memory. They also had greater trouble relative to their counterparts when asked to switch rapidly between two different tasks. This last finding was surprising, because psychologists know that multitasking involves switching rapidly between tasks rather than actually performing multiple tasks simultaneously.

It seems that chronic media-multitaskers are more susceptible to distractions. In contrast, people who do not usually engage in mediamultitasking showed a greater ability to focus on important information. According to the researchers, this reflects two fundamentally different strategies of information processing. Those who engage in me- dia-multitasking more frequently are "breadth-biased," preferring to explore any available information rather than restrict themselves, they develop a habit of treating all information equally. On the other extreme are those who avoid breadth in favor of information that is relevant to an immediate goal.

Notes:

•multitasking - многозадачность, многозадачная работа, многозадачный режим

•cater for / to - удовлетворять (требования) ; угождать, потворст-

вовать (чьим-л. прихотям)

•counterpart - коллега, человек, находящийся на аналогичной должности или выполняющий сходную работу

•tout [taut] - назойливорасхваливать, рекламировать, навязывать

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Теxt 7

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The Evolution of Marketing and Society

Marketing has evolved historically through numerous stages. There are four distinct stages that occur during the development of an economy, beginning with the start of “exchange” between two parties. The four stages each have three specific areas: the level of industrialization; the values and attitudes of management towards marketing; and the degree of marketing knowledge.

Stage 1

In the preindustrial (tribal, herdsman, or agrarian) stage, few if

any individuals had accumulated capital, and life was devoted to meeting the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter. This stage, usually reached within the family or tribal unit, has little specialization

of labour or resources. In the marketing area all emphasis is on the production of useful, basic items. Most products are custom-made, fashioned by hand, and little attention is paid to anything like a “marketing mix”. This is state of unconscious ignorance. People “do

not know that they do not know” that there are actually marketing principles and techniques in operation. Even though these techniques, values, and attitudes actually exist, there is no awareness of this.

Stage 2

In the beginning of industrialization, specialization of labour has become so developed that assembly-line production is occurring

for standardized products. This is selling concept stage, with production people feeling: “We make it. It’s the sales department’s

job to sell it.” Little emphasis is given to determining whether the product being made is the best one to satisfy the customers’ needs.

“You can have any colour you want as long as it is black.” The marketing people during this stage are aware of the existence of underlying principles and concepts. While the existence of such principles is acknowledged, they are not yet defined or clearly understood.

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overproduce. Management, at this point, has adopted the marketing concept, with emphasis on the customer. Customers’ needs are

carrying out the proper principles without actually referring to them.

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world is in the industrialization stage, and the United States, Japan, and Germany are in the postindustrial stage.

Second, all enterprises within a particular country are not in the same stage at a given time. In the United States, there are corporations that are still in the product stage of marketing, while still others are in the consumer stage and selling concept stage. Some are in the societal stage.

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Software Engineering

Computer software is a collection of programs that provide the instructions telling a computer what and how to do. Software comprises the entire set of programs, procedures, routines, and subroutines associated with the operation of a computer system. The term was coined to differentiate these instructions from hardware – i.e., the physical components of a computer system. A set of instructions that directs a computer’s hardware to perform a task is called a program, or software program.

The two main types of software are system software and application software. System software controls a computer’s internal functioning, chiefly through an operating system, and also controls peripherals and storage devices. Application software, by contrast, directs the computer to execute commands given by the user and may

be said to include any program that processes data for a user. Application software thus includes word processors, spreadsheets,

linked in a network; (2) middleware, that controls and coordinates distributed systems; (3) testware, that is software for testing hardware or a software package; (4) firmware, that is permanently stored in a computer’s memory, treated like hardware ( so called “hard software”) and run by other software programs; (5) programming languages, that

define the syntax and semantics of computer programs and (6)

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programming tools, that help conduct computing tasks (e. g. debugging) in any category listed above.

Perhaps the most important task for software engineering is to define and improve the process by which programs are developed. In general, the overall steps in developing a program can be represented

phases. The results of each phase cascade down into the next:

Requirement phase deals with detailed specification of what the program will be required to do. This can include developing a prototype and getting user’s reaction to it. Software design implies

program using realistic data and field testing is the purpose of the integration and testing phase.

Software maintenance is the process of modifying a software system or component (that is correcting errors and adding requested minor features). There are three classes of software maintenance. Perfective maintenance incorporates changes demanded by the user;

these may, for example, be due to changes in requirements or legislation, or be for embedded applications in response to changes in

the surrounding system. Adaptive maintenance incorporates changes made necessary by modifications in the software or hardware

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(operational) environment of the program, including changes in the maintenance environment. Corrective maintenance is the successful repair of faults discovered in the software.

Maintenance for software always involves a change in the software. This may be effected at the coding level, or may require significant changes in design. Regression testing of the software

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Programming Techniques

Computer programming is a field that has to do with the analytical creation of source code that can be used to configure computer systems. More detailed, programming (or coding) is the process of designing, writing, testing,

(or troubleshooting), and maintaining the source code of computer programs.

The purpose of programming is to create a program that exhibits a certain desired behavior. The process of writing source code often requires expertise in many different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms and formal logic.

In what follows, some most common programming techniques will be considered.

equality and linear inequality constraints. Given a polytope and a realvalued affine function defined on this polytope, a linear programming method will find a point on the polytope, where this function has the smallest (or largest) value if such point exists, by searching through the polytope vertices. Linear programming is useful for guiding quantitative decisions in business planning, industrial engineering, and

– to a lesser extent – in the social and physical sciences.

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avoids mutable data. Functional programming wants to avoid state changes as much as possible and works with data flowing between functions. This method has its roots in lambda calculus, developed in the 1930s to investigate function definition, function application, and recursion. Many functional programming languages can be viewed as elaborations on the lambda calculus.

greatly simplify some programming tasks. In brief, recursive programming is the situation in which a procedure calls itself, passing in a modified value of the parameter(s) that was passed in to the current iteration of the procedure. Typically, a recursive programming environment contains (at least) two procedures: first, a procedure to set up the initial environment and make the initial call to the recursive procedure, and second, the recursive procedure itself that calls itself one or more times.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming language model organized around “objects” rather than “actions” and data rather than logic. OOP uses predefined programming modular units (objects, classes, subclasses, and so forth) in order to make programming faster and easier to maintain. Object-oriented languages help to manage complexity in large programs. Objects package data and the operations on them so that only the operations are publicly accessible and internal details of the data structures are hidden. This information hiding made large-scale programming easier by allowing

a programmer to think about each part of the program in isolation. In addition, objects may be derived from more general ones, “inheriting” their capabilities. Such an object hierarchy made it possible to define specialized objects without repeating all that is in the more general ones.

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requirements. It is important to ensure that the food processing

ingredient and packaging suppliers, should a recall of the product be required. It also deals with labeling issues to ensure there is correct ingredient and nutritional information.

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yeast can often be reduced or removed by adding a large proportion of hard wheat flour to the rye flour; the added gluten compensates for amylase activity on the starch in the bread, allowing it to retain its structure as it cooks. (The Jewish rye bread tradition in the United States is based upon this mixing of grains.) The use of high-gluten

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