Vocabulary:

	emblematic - показательный;символический;эмблематический, знаковый
	maintain - поддерживать в рабочем состоянии;эксплуатировать makeover - модернизация,реконструкция, улучшение, преобразование
	public realm - общественная зона, общественная территория catch out – застигнуть, поймать famed - прославленный;известный;знаменитый
	excess – избыток co-founder - соучредитель
	In the article find synonyms to the words below:
	place, spot – to make - every day - to be open to be closed - breakdown -
	a cause – during - to work - popular, famous - to keep -

How to survive a plane crash

Have you ever wondered what you would do if a plane you are on had to make an emergency landing? It is a question British Airways regularly considers.

Passengers are taught to be aware of their surroundings and familiarise themselves with what happens during an emergency.

Andy Clubb, British Airways Safety Instructor said: “The most important thing we then go onto is the brace position – that’s vitally important – and then they learn how to get themselves out of an aircraft by opening the doors in the over-wing exits.”

Onboard simulated flights, passengers are treated to a regular safety demonstration by a flight attendant.

“Passengers always feel as if they’re left out of the loop somewhere along the line so we put them through an emergency evacuation given them the opportunity to think about it,” says Clubb.

“We give them the answers and they suddenly realise that in any given situation where it’s an evacuation or a decompression, there are actually positive things that they can do to put control back into their hands,” adds Clubb.

Statistically, flying remains one of the safest forms of travel.

Every day, some 8.3 million people around the globe climb aboard nearly 93,500 flights and they almost always land safely.

In the past decade, there have only been 138 crashes worldwide that had fatalities, according to aviation consultancy Ascend.

Simulated – имитируемый, моделированный,

Tablets, phones and the iPad Air2: a turning point (кульминация, переломный момент)?

The tablet world has a newcomer in the form of Apple’s new iPad Air 2, which includes a fingerprint sensor to provide increased personal security. It is just 6.1mm thick, the thinnest tablet Apple has yet produced – although its predecessor wasn’t exactly beefy at 7.5mm. The iPad Air 2 has a new anti-glare (антибликовый) screen, a second generation 64-bit chip, an iSight camera and a renewed FaceTime HD camera, so you’ll be able to see your mother’s new curtains a little better than before. It offers faster Wifi and LTEwireless connectivity. All that is going to set you back about 400 euros. However, it’s not clear how it will fare in an increasingly crowded tablet-phone-handheld-computer-thingy market, which according to tech research fund Gartner will only grow 11 per cent this year, compared to a heady 55 per cent last year.

Is this a turning point for tablets? Are they going to morph (превращаться)  into phones, or tiny laptops? We put the question to Paolo Ottolina, the technology expert from the newspaper “Corriere della Sera” which is one of the oldest and most prestigious daily newspapers in Italy. He thinks that the choice is already on the table: “You may remember that, a few years ago, after the launch of the first iPad, Steve Jobs said that we have entered the post PC era, raising the possibility that personal computerscould soon disappear from our lives, to be replaced by something different. But last year, even Apple, with its iPad, saw sales drop, despite more, and smaller, models available. This is probably because business users, amongst others, find that although a tablet is useful for surfing websites, writing short emails, watching films and listening to music, it is not so useful for writing long texts, and doing other office activities. Which is why last year, traditional tablets sold less, and PCs did a little better.” Ottolina goes on to stress that in the meantime some tablets have evolved (развивать), and now feature clickable keyboards that mean you can turn them into a real small laptop or even use it for presentations.”

He now sees the larger-screened smartphones as competitors to tablets: “A smartphone which has a 5.7 inch nearly 6 inch screen, isn’t used for tasks that differ much from using a small tablet, say a 7-inch one, so that has revitalized the tablet market a bit. And people often – also because of the economic crisis – prefer to buy a single device which acts both as smartphone and a bit as a small tablet, rather than having two different devices.”

The inventor of computer mouse

Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013)

Douglas Engelbart, a technologist who conceived of the computer mouse and laid out a vision of an Internet decades before others brought those ideas to the mass market, died at the age of 88.

Engelbart arrived at his crowning moment relatively early in his career, on a winter afternoon in 1968, when he delivered an hour-long presentation containing so many far-reaching ideas that it would be referred to decades later as the “mother of all demos.”

Speaking before an audience of 1,000 leading technologists in San Francisco, Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), showed off a cubic device with two rolling discs called an “X-Y position indicator for a display system.” It was the mouse’s public debut.

Engelbart then summoned, in real-time, the image and voice of a colleague 30 miles (48 km) away. That was the first videoconference. And he explained a theory of how pages of information could be tied together using text-based links, an idea that would later form the bedrock of the Web’s architecture.

At a time when computing was largely pursued by government researchers or hobbyists with a countercultural bent, Engelbart never sought or enjoyed the explosive wealth that would later become synonymous with Silicon Valley success. For instance, he never received any royalties for the mouse, which SRI patented and later licensed to Apple.

He was intensely driven instead by a belief that computerscould be used to augment human intellect. In talks and papers, he described with zeal and bravado a vision of a society in which groups of highly productive workers would spend many hours a day collectively manipulating information on shared computers.

“The possibilities we are pursuing involve an integrated man-machine working relationship, where close, continuous interaction with a computer avails the human of radically changed information-handling and -portrayal skills,” he wrote in a 1961 research proposal at SRI.

His work, he argued with typical conviction, “competes in social significance with research toward harnessing thermonuclear power, exploring outer space, or conquering cancer.”

A proud visionary, Engelbart found himself intellectually isolated at various points in his life. But over time he was proved correct more often than not.

“To see the Internet and the World Wide Web become the dominant paradigms in computing is an enormous vindication of his vision,” Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s almost like Leonardo da Vinci envisioning the helicopter hundreds of years before they could actually be built.”

By 2000, Engelbart had won prestigious accolades including the National Medal of Technologyand the Turing Award. He lived in comfort in Atherton, a suburb near Stanford University.

In 2005, he told Tom Foremski, a technology journalist, that he felt the last two decades of his life had been a “failure” because he could not receive funding for his research or “engage anybody in a dialogue.”

Douglas Carl Engelbart was born on Jan. 30, 1925 in Portland to a radio repairman father who was often absent and a homemaker mother. He enrolled at Oregon State University, but was drafted into the U.S. Navy and shipped to the Pacific before he could graduate.

He resolved to change the world as a computer scientist after coming across a 1945 article by Vannevar Bush, the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research, while scouring a Red Cross library in a native hut in the Philippines, he told an interviewer years later. After returning to the United States to complete his degree, Engelbart took a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley, after Stanford declined to hire him because his research seemed too removed from practical applications. It would not be the first time his ideas were rejected.

Engelbart also worked at the Ames Laboratory, and the precursor to NASA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. He obtained a doctorate in electrical engineering from Berkeley in 1955.

He took a job at SRI in 1957, and by the early-1960s Engelbart led a team that began to seriously investigate tools for interactive computing.

After coming back from a computer graphics conference in 1961, Engelbart sketched a design of what would become the mouse and tasked Bill English, an engineering colleague, to carve a prototype out of wood. Engelbart’s team considered other designs, including a device that would be affixed to the underside of a table and controlled by the knee, but the desktop mouse won out.

SRI would later license the technology for $40,000 to Apple, which released its first commercial mouse with the Lisa computer in 1983. By the late 1970s, Engelbart’s research group was acquired by a company called Tymshare. In the final decades of his career, Engelbart struggled to secure funding for his work, much less return to the same heights of influence.

“I don’t think he was at peace with himself, partly because many, many things that he forecast all came to pass, but many of the things that he saw in his vision still hadn’t,” said Kapor, who helped fund Engelbart’s work in the 1990s. “He was frustrated by his inability to move the field forward.”

In 1986, Engelbart told interviewers from Stanford that his mind had always roamed in a way that set him apart or even alienated him. “Growing up without a father, through the teenage years and such, I was always sort of different,” Engelbart said. “Other people knew what they were doing, and had good guidance, and had enough money to do it. I was getting by, and trying. I never expected, ever, to be the same as anyone else.”