Технический перевод. Учебное пособие

U n i t 10

Read the text and answer the question in the heading.

Are we naturally good or bad?

It's a question humanity has repeatedly asked itself, and one way to find out is to take a closer look at the behaviour of babies… and use puppets.

1.Fundamentally speaking, are humans good or bad? It's a question that has

repeatedly been asked throughout humanity. For thousands of years, philosophers have debated whether we have a basically good nature that is corrupted by society, or a basically bad nature that is kept in check by society. Psychology has uncovered some evidence which might give the old debate a twist.

2.One way of asking about our most fundamental characteristics is to look at babies. Babies' minds are a wonderful showcase for human nature. Babies are humans with the absolute minimum of cultural influence – they don't have many friends, have never been to school and haven't read any books. They can't even control their own bowels, let alone speak the language, so their minds are as close to innocent as a human mind can get.

3.The only problem is that the lack of language makes it tricky to gauge their opinions. Normally we ask people to take part in experiments, giving them instructions or asking them to answer questions, both of which require language. Babies may be cuter to work with, but they are not known for their obedience. What's a curious psychologist to do?

4.Fortunately, you don't necessarily have to speak to reveal your opinions. Babies will reach for things they want or like, and they will tend to look longer at things that surprise them. Ingenious experiments carried out at Yale University in the US used these measures to look at babies' minds. Their results suggest that even the youngest humans have a sense of right and wrong, and, furthermore, an instinct to prefer good over evil.

How could the experiments tell this? Imagine you are a baby. Since you have a short attention span, the experiment will be shorter and loads more fun than most psychology experiments. It was basically a kind of puppet show; the stage a scene featuring a bright green hill, and the puppets were cut-out shapes with stick on wobbly eyes; a triangle, a square and a circle, each in their own bright colours. What happened next was a short play, as one of the shapes tried to climb the hill, struggling up and falling

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back down again. Next, the other two shapes got involved, with either one helping the climber up the hill, by pushing up from behind, or the other hindering the climber, by pushing back from above.

5. Already something amazing, psychologically, is going on here. All humans are able to interpret the events in the play in terms of the story I’ve described. The puppets are just shapes. They don't make human sounds or display human emotions. They just move about, and yet everyone reads these movements as purposeful, and revealing of their characters. You can argue that this "mind reading", even in infants, shows that it is part of our human nature to believe in other minds.

Great expectations

6.What happened next tells us even more about human nature. After the show, infants were given the choice of reaching for either the helping or the hindering shape, and it turned out they were much more likely to reach for the helper. This can be explained if they are reading the events of the show in terms of motivations – the shapes aren't just moving at random, but they showed to the infant that the shape pushing uphill "wants" to help out (and so is nice) and the shape pushing downhill "wants" to cause problems (and so is nasty).

7.The researchers used an encore to confirm these results. Infants saw a second scene in which the climber shape made a choice to move towards either the helper shape or the hinderer shape. The time infants spent looking in each of the two cases revealed what they thought of the outcome. If the climber moved towards the hinderer the infants looked significantly longer than if the climber moved towards the helper. This makes sense if the infants were surprised when the climber approached the hinderer. Moving towards the helper shape would be the happy ending, and obviously it was what the infant expected. If the climber moved towards the hinderer it was a surprise, as much as you or I would be surprised if we saw someone give a hug to a man who had just knocked him over.

8.The way to make sense of this result is if infants, with their precultural brains had expectations about how people should act. Not only do they interpret the movement of the shapes as resulting from motivations, but they prefer helping motivations over hindering ones.

9.This doesn't settle the debate over human nature. A cynic would say that it just shows that infants are self-interested and expect others to be the same way. At a minimum though, it shows that tightly bound into the nature of our developing minds is the ability to make sense of the world in terms of motivations, and a basic instinct to prefer friendly intentions over malicious ones. It is on this foundation that adult morality is built.

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Exercise 1. Make sentences putting the given words into a correct order.

1.monitored – of astronauts – The health – carefully. – very – is

2.associated with – There are – radiation – dangers – also – the Sun. – coming from

3.entirely – The researchers – the dolphins – words. – constructed – instructions – gave – of – familiar

Exercise 2. Match words to their definitions:

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Exercise 3. Make questions to underlined parts of the sentences below:

1.Babies are humans with the absolute minimum of cultural influence – they don't have many friends, have never been to school and haven't read any books.

2.Babies may be cuter to work with, but they are not known for their obedience.

3.The puppets are just shapes.

4.The researchers used an encore to confirm these results.

5.The time infants spent looking in each of the two cases revealed what they thought of the outcome.

Exercise 4. Edit the machine translation of the text.

Exercise 5. Translate paragraphs (6) and (7) into Russian. Exercise 6. Give a summary of the text in 80 words.

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Supplementary reading

Text 1. Long space missions 'may damage eyesight'.

The eyes and brains of astronauts who have spent long periods of time in orbit can develop abnormalities, new research has suggested.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on 27 spacefarers found effects similar to those that can occur in intracranial

hypertension, which results in a build up of pressure within the skull.

The concern would be that astronauts could suffer eyesight problems. It was led by Larry Kramer, a professor of diagnostic and

interventional imaging at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

His team examined astronauts who had spent more than 30 days of cumulative time in the weightless environment of space.

The group found evidence for expansion of the cerebral spinal fluid space surrounding the optic nerve of nine of the astronauts, a flattening of the rear of the eyeball in six, a bulging of the optic nerve in four, and changes in the pituitary gland and its connection to the brain in three individuals. The pituitary gland secretes and stores hormones that regulate a variety of important body functions.

The health of astronauts is very carefully monitored. Living in weightless conditions for extended periods can result in a loss of bone density and in muscle wastage. There are also dangers associated with radiation coming from the Sun.

It is partly for these reasons that stays on the International Space Station (ISS) are restricted to six months. If missions to Mars were ever conducted, the period of travel to and from the planet would likely take over a year.

US space agency (Nasa) medical staff said they were looking into the latest concerns, but that the scale of abnormalities observed did not have them unduly worried at this stage.

William Tarver, the chief of flight medicine clinic at Nasa's Johnson Space Center, said the results were suspicious but not conclusive of intracranial hypertension.

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"Nasa has placed this problem high on its list of human risks, has initiated a comprehensive programme to study its mechanisms and implications, and will continue to closely monitor the situation", he said.

Text 2. How bacteria could solve China's rush-hour blues.

Imagine a world mostly free of traffic jams as intelligent systems watch over traffic flow and direct vehicles accordingly.

As the largest city in southern China, with a population of around 13 million, Guangzhou has traffic so bad it's legendary. One way to

alleviate it would be to increase the intelligence of traffic lights – converting them from dumb beasts that beat out the same rhythm all day long into dynamic managers of vehicle flow.

And now two Chinese researchers have proved, at least theoretically, that insights borrowed from the lowly bacterium E. coli could markedly increase the throughput of a real-world traffic light in Guangzhou. No one knows what effect this could have if it were applied to an entire city, but it's fitting that a solution from a class of algorithms that seek to mimic the collective behaviour of organisms should be applied to the teeming masses of Guangzhou's trucks and automobiles.

Traffic lights around the world, from Guangzhou to Geneva, are managed by computerised systems housed in a metal cabinet at the side of the road, which regulate the cycle of changes from red to green to red either through fixed time periods, or through sensors in the road that can detect when a car is stationary. Both options work well when traffic is low, less so during rush hour, as any driver will tell you.

The solution Qin Liu and Jianmin Xu have proposed for improving flow during high traffic periods is what's known as a Bacterial Foraging Optimisation (BFO) algorithm. The algorithm varies when and for how long a given light is red or green. So, for example, the algorithm has an almost traffic cop-like sense for which road at an intersection has a higher volume of traffic, and when to strategically deprioritise traffic that may be waiting on a less-used road. Simulations of a Guangzhou intersection showed that BFO-regulated lights reduce the average delay of vehicles by over 28% compared with those regulated by a fixed time cycle.

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Behaviour code

It's part of a surprisingly rich history of applying algorithms inspired by nature to traffic light timing – researchers have applied everything from genetic algorithms to models of ant behaviour to the problem. And it's not just traffic lights – BFO can be used on just about any engineering problem, from tuning the behaviour of simple automated control systems, such as those used to regulate the level of water in water towers, to determining the lightest and strongest configuration of structural elements in a building.

BFO was invented in 2002 by Ohio State professor of electrical and computer engineering Kevin Passino. As is the case with many discoveries, Passino wasn't searching for a better mousetrap when he stumbled into one. Instead, he was merely trying to create a faithful simulation of the foodseeking behaviour of E. coli.

Like many bacteria, E. coli swims more or less randomly, but it will spend more time swimming in the direction of food and less time swimming away from it. This incredibly simple behaviour allows the bacterium to move up a chemical gradient, from areas of lower concentration to areas of higher concentration. Once Passino expressed this behaviour in code, he had his eureka moment.

"I realised that it could solve engineering problems, because what it was doing was performing an optimisation", says Passino. Many engineering problems like design, quality control and maintenance of buildings and devices can be expressed as "optimisation problems", in which a single number, known as a performance index, quantifies how good any particular solution is. A good algorithm will find the best possible combination of all the parameters in a system to make it perform as well as possible according to this one measurement of quality.

Follow the swarm

Individually, E. coli aren't very smart. Yet according to Passino, making them more intelligent about their environment doesn't improve the performance of his algorithm. In part, that's because BFO finds the optimal solution to any problem by letting multiple virtual E. coli loose, one after another. After a hundred or so have run the simulation, generally at least one has found a pretty good solution.

Running the algorithm over and over again turns it into a classic case of parallel processing, which is exactly the trick our (relatively slow, at the neuronal level) brains employ to outwit computers on most tasks. It's also the very definition of "swarm intelligence", in which groups of animals operating according to simple rules can solve very tough problems.

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Other biomimetic algorithms exist, some of which simulate ants, bees or swarms of insects. Further afield, there are algorithms that simulate genes and natural selection, and even primitive nervous systems. They're all part of a much broader class of solutions that seek the best possible solution to any particular optimisation problem.

Knowing that these solutions can operate on real-world problems doesn't mean they've been incorporated, yet. At this stage, the research by Qin Liu and Jianmin Xu has yet to go beyond the modelling stage. But it's reasonable to expect that as the components of cities become ever more interconnected, centralised traffic systems will incorporate whichever combination of optimisation algorithms – out of the thousands available – will be best at reducing urban China's infamous traffic.

Text 3. Putting a price on computer nostalgia.

A rare functioning Apple 1 computer sells for more than double the estimated price at an auction in New York.

For people who tend to have one eye on the future, geeks also indulge in their fair share of nostalgia.

Ask one of a certain age (ask me, indeed) about the changing nature of computing, and it won't be long before they're reminiscing about the look, feel, sense and weight of a beloved old BBC Micro Model B, Sinclair ZX81, Macintosh 128 K, – or perhaps how they used to creep into the smoky semi-darkness of a local arcade to feed small change into Donkey Kong and Galaga.

Despite the rise of the internet and the amount of time we invest in seemingly transient, digital worlds, we cannot help becoming emotionally attached to physical objects.

The fetishistic power of them looms as large as ever in our lives. What is shifting, however, is the ways in which this fetish plays out.

Once upon a time, books, LPs, battered posters and photograph albums were the physical expression of our lives, on display for all to see. Today, in a word of Kindles and iPads, affection flows down narrower channels – towards the tools that gift us entry to the online world. Just ask a teenager how they feel towards the sleek smartphone in their pocket, or the tablet peeking out of their tote bag.

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Or, for a more extreme example, look to a recent auction in New York where one of only 200 Apple 1 computers ever created was sold for $374,500 – more than double its estimate. It's one of only a handful of working models remaining in the world, but it's unlikely that the buyer is interested in actually using it. Like a Ming vase or a first folio of Shakespeare's complete works (yours for not less than $5 m), it's the aura of the object that matters, along with its unique place in history.

Investment tip

The era of home computing was only born once and, as it steadily recedes from us into history, the price for owning an iconic piece of it is only going to go up. If I had enough cash – and a serious amount would be required – I can imagine bidding for Apple 1s at auction. They remain, after all, a real bargain compared to Shakespeare; and I like to imagine that I'd use mine from time to time, as I do my beloved, battered BBC Micro.

There's something important encoded in the idea of having an active relationship with our technological past. Unlike art or historical artifacts (which we're happy simply to look at), interaction is crucial to our relationship with computers. The Apple 1 and its ilk were machines designed to be played and tinkered with, programmed, adjusted, used; and the opportunity to see such machines continue to be used is perhaps the most precious legacy computing collectors can bequeath – not least because of how far and how fast our physical relationship with machines has shifted in the last half-century.

Today, in an era of devices mass manufactured to the tune of many millions, objects' auras don't rest on rarity. Microsoft's launch of its new Surface tablets may well go down as a major event in the history of computing, but I doubt we'll be paying the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars for first-generation Surface machines forty years from now.

If you want an investment tip, then, here it is: it's all about the owner. There will never be another Apple 1. Come the 22nd-century, however, Bill Gates's very own mass-manufactured office desktop computer may be pipping Apple 1s at the auction house – while Steve Jobs's personal firstedition iPod (if such an object exists) could become literally priceless.

While celebrity ownership offers a new kind of aura to massmanufactured devices, however, it's likely to remain less interesting to most of us that the purely personal: those devices that each of us have lived with, gathering dust in a draw, still bearing the knocks and thumb-smudges of involvement in almost every aspect of modern living.

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Perhaps this is why I, at least, feel the urge to hold onto my old computers. Because, increasingly, the histories of our lives are also the histories of our machines: the experiences we have had with and through them. If we want someone in 2050 to understand the texture our lives, we need to be able to ensure their access to our devices: from apps running on original iPhones to Nintendo games consoles, Android tablets, mass-market desktops, and even those brick-like phones many of us first made a mobile call through. Without the hardware, you have only half the story.

Only a few of today's digital devices will ever become collectors' items; and most of those are likely to end up locked away from the world, alongside art, antiques and first editions. It's the rest, though, that really matters. In a digital age, these are the building blocks of our individual histories – and hanging onto them may become one of the most important ways we tell the story of our selves.

Text 4. Wireless highway charges electric cars as they go.

Companies are still betting on a bright future for electric cars, despite a lukewarm response to the latest offerings.

Road works. Inconsiderate drivers. Congestion. Today's drivers have their fair share of stress already. But now there is a new

malaise for the modern motorist: range anxiety.

That is the term given to drivers of electric cars that are struck by the sudden fear that their vehicle does not have enough charge to reach its destination. Most of us have experienced that sinking feeling when the little orange indicator light comes on to tell us we are low on petrol, but there is not a gas station in sight. Imagine that, combined with the feeling that you get when your cellphone starts beeping because the battery is low, and you are nowhere near a plug. That gets you close to the feeling of range anxiety.

It is an interesting phenomenon, particularly when you begin to look at how many of us actually use our cars. According to the US Bureau of Transportation Studies, 78% of drivers do less than 40 miles (65 km) a day – a trivial distance for many of today's electric cars. In fact, the poster child of electric cars – the Tesla – has a range of 300 miles (485 km) using some batteries.

According to, Dr Richard Sassoon, of Stanford University, there are "three main reasons" that many of us choose the internal combustion engine over its cleaner, quieter alternative.

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