Causing Happiness

A group of psychologists from two universities in the United States have found that people who classified themselves as happy were also more talkative than their unhappy counterparts and their conversation had more substance.

Participants in the study were equipped with an Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) over a four-day period. 30 seconds of conversation were sampled (отображались) by the device every 12 and a half minutes.

The study found that the happiest people to take part in the study spent 25% less time alone than the unhappiest people, and spent 70% more time talking. They also had twice as many substantive (существенных) conversations and just a third of the small talk.

Really, happy people seem to speak more.

I’d rather say, they make unhappier the rest, who are to listen to the “happy ones”.

Not so simple. Happiness depends on more reasons.

Singularity: Utopia or Inevitability?

Following the publication of his 2005 book "The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" Kurzweil has become known, above all, as a technology speculator whose predictions have polarised opinion - from stone-cold scepticism and splenetic (раздражённого) disagreement to dedicated worship and admiration.

In Kurzweil's estimation, we will be able to upload the human brain to a computer, capturing (включая) "a person's entire personality, memory, skills and history", by the end of the 2030s; humans and non-biological machines will then merge (соединятся) so effectively that the differences between them will no longer matter; and, after that, human intelligence, transformed for the better, will start to expand outward into the universe, around about 2045.

Borrowed from black-hole physics, in which the singularity is taken to signify what is unknowable, the term has been applied to technology to suggest that we haven't really got a clue what's going to happen once machines are vastly more "intelligent" than humans. The singularity, writes Kurzweil, is "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact (воздействие) so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed".

Many people reject to Kurzweil’s ideas claiming the disgust of uploading their consciousness anywhere.

But Kurzweil implies things to reveal deliberately. "People can argue about it," says he, "when it comes down to accepting each step along the way, it's done really without much debate."

II - Grammar

The Present Perfect Tense

Настоящее совершенное, “преднастоящее” – обозначает результат действия совершённого в прошлом, но очевидного сейчас.

Образуется по схеме: have (has) + 3 форма глагола I have done He has gone

Признаки	Смысл
Отсутствие обозначения времени We have won the match	- Важен результат действия - Следствия ощущаются сейчас (актуально сейчас) - Можно заменить на конструкцию в настоящем (The match is won)
Присутствие наречий неопределённого времени already, just, recently, never, ever, yet It has already stopped raining. We may go for a walk
Присутствие since She has not heard of him since they left school
Незакончившийся период I haven't seen her today
Начало диалога Have you got a message? No, I haven't. But I didn't need it very much.	Начав с указания на актуальность темы, переходят к упрощённой конструкции. Диалог часто начинается в Present Perfect и продолжается в Past Simple