本文内容为2012春季高口阅读上半场MC第一篇，原文出自businessweek，原文标题为MIT Professor Gives Language Lessons to Computers。
MIT Professor Gives Language Lessons to Computers
出自：http://www.businessweek.com
There’s a scene in the 2008 movie Iron Man where Tony Stark, the film’s inventor-superhero, threatens to donate one of his robots to a city college. You can tell by its cowed response that the computerized assistant understands the connotation is decidedly negative. In real life, software can’t yet comprehend that kind of abstract scolding. Programmers refer to such banter as “natural language,” and it’s tricky for computers to get because of its ambiguity and dependence on context.
Regina Barzilay, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to make computers better listeners by making them play Civilization, a 20-year-old strategy game in which players build a city into an empire by vanquishing and absorbing neighboring cultures. A member of MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab, Barzilay, 40, developed a software program that begins with no grasp of the game. The computer “reads” the manual and then keeps returning to it while playing. As it races through thousands of simulations, the computer learns to connect words in the directions (“attack,” “build,” “capture,” and “revolt”) as the game unfolds.
The computer gets positive reinforcement—a higher score and a win—when it makes correct guesses about the meaning of words. When the computer loses, it traces back through its reading of the manual to see where its interpretation went wrong. A similar program without access to the manual won the game 46 percent of the time; after reading the instructions, Barzilay’s computer won 79 percent of the time.
Barzilay grew interested in natural-language processing in the early 1990s, as an undergraduate at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel. She was inspired in part by her own experience as a young emigrant from Moldavia who had to learn Hebrew and English. Just as she struggled at first to understand the use of articles such as “the,” which have no equivalent in her native Russian, logic-based computers have difficulties with the inconsistencies of natural language.
Research like Barzilay’s may help computers eventually interact with humans in a more normal way. “You’d like to be able to ask for the largest state bordering New York and have it come back with the answer, ‘Pennsylvania,’” says Dan Roth, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who does work similar to Barzilay’s. “And what happens inside the computer is none of your business.” Barzilay has been pushing this line of work forward, he says, in part by using a more interesting and complex game. She has a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to help robots understand natural language, not unlike those in Iron Man. As she puts it: “I want to see the computer benefit directly from human knowledge, without having a person in the middle who does a translation.”
Raising the school-leaving age will make teachers ill
www.guardian.co.uk
It’s the start of the new school year. The bell’s gone, 30-odd pupils have shuffled into class and you’re now facing a roomful of stroppy 17-year-olds who very vocally don’t want to be there.
As a teacher, this may well be your daily reality in 2015, when all young people up to the age of 18 will have to be either in full-time education or work-based training.
And based on what happened in Spain when the school-leaving age was raised from 14 to 16 in 1998, new research from economists at Lancaster University warns that schools could be hit with mass absenteeism when teachers find themselves unable to do their job because half their class isn’t interested.
Colin Green, senior lecturer at Lancaster University management school, says evidence from Spain shows that raising the compulsory "participation age" is likely to result in lower job satisfaction for teachers, greater problems with stress, and and more people leaving the profession.
Employers, he points out, will have a choice as to which young people they take on. Schools, by contrast, will have a duty to accept all comers. This means there is likely to be a large cohort of teenagers who would much rather have left school, but who will be required to spend two years more with their heads in a book.
For sixth-form. teachers, who have till now looked forward to lessons with keen-as-mustard – or at least moderately willing – A-level students, the dynamic of every class is likely to change dramatically, and is unlikely to be conducive to better learning outcomes for any of those involved.
Given this prospect, says Green, teachers should pay attention to how their day-to-day working lives will be affected when the school-leaving age goes up.
The study, done in collaboration with his research associate Maria Navarro, shows that as soon as Spain raised the statutory leaving age, "secondary school teacher absenteeism rose sharply – on average, by between 15% to 20%".
"And it wasn’t a one-off," Green says. "Absence rates have stayed high in all the years following the reform. And the increase in teacher absenteeism has clear implications for the quality of education that students receive."
A particularly troubling finding, he notes, is that increases in teacher absence was even higher in areas where fewer children traditionally stayed on in school, reaching 40% in the worst areas."Teachers in these schools faced the largest change in the mix of students after the policy was implemented."
Of course, it’s the areas with larger proportions of teenagers who would prefer to leave school that most need extra professional support. But instead, because teachers will find themselves under more pressure, classes are likely to be more disrupted, and absence rates will shoot through the roof. "There’s a real danger," Green says, "that the policy will decrease the quality of education and training provision."
Green is not scaremongering. Previous research has shown that teacher absence is a cause of poor pupil achievement. Worse still, the negative effects of teachers being absent in large numbers for long periods are more severe for poorer pupils.
Given growing concern about the large numbers of young people in England who leave school with few qualifications and prospects, Green observes that the raising of the school-leaving age was virtually inevitable. "The profile of the August rioters will have added further steel to the commitment to keep under-18s inside one system or another," he says.
The problem the government faces, however, is that while many working in education might share the view that it’s better for young people to remain in education or training, forcing reluctant teenagers to stay on at school may have the opposite effect to the one ministers intend. "The potential for a direct effect is clear: more students in schools and colleges will lead to more teaching hours and, in the absence of more teachers as a result of tightening budgets, either to an increase in teaching workloads or an increase in class sizes," says Green.
"All the evidence suggests that teaching and managing these students, and combining their needs with those of young people who would have chosen to stay on already, is likely to present new and difficult challenges."
Absenteeism on the scale observed by Green and Navarro in Spain is only one indicator of the impact of raising the participation age that ministers need to take note of. Green suggests that, like all employees, if teachers are not compensated in some way for a significant change in the essential nature of their work – through improvements in working conditions or increased pay – it’s likely to have a negative effect on how they feel about their professional purpose.
For the policy of raising the compulsory leaving age to be successful, ministers will be heavily dependent on teachers’ willingness to flex and adapt and, put bluntly, work harder in more difficult conditions.
Green suggests that the government would do well to find out what teachers feel would recompense them for the changes they’ll have to make to their professional practice.
If nothing is done, he warns, "all these factors add up to the same thing – a poorer quality experience and level of opportunities for young people. There is the danger that schools will become not the hoped-for platform. for development, encouragement and inspiration, but instead a ’holding’ camp for a growing number of disengaged young people."
The Truth About the Poverty Crisis
www.time.com
It’s official: There are now more poor people in America than at any other time in the 52 years records have been kept. We knew that the 2010 poverty numbers, released by the Census Bureau on Sept. 13, weren’t going to be good. They turned out to be, in the words of Brookings senior fellow Ron Haskins, "extraordinarily bad." More than 15% of Americans live below the poverty line. The total rose for the fourth consecutive year. For a family of four, poverty means scraping by on roughly $22,000 a year.
The new poverty crisis has emerged in part out of the other economic crisis we are facing: unemployment. The fastest way to poverty is job loss, and 6.5 million jobs were lost in the recession. Today, a full two years into the "recovery," more than 9% of Americans are still out of work. But a fact that may be buried in the copious coverage of these new figures is that the poverty problem didn’t start with the financial crisis and the subsequent downturn. Its roots go much deeper, possibly to the recession of 2000, after which poverty levels didn’t drop back to their prerecession numbers as they typically do after a recovery.
Though it’s difficult to tease out statistically, that turning point is undoubtedly a legacy of the previous two decades of hyperglobalization, when tens of millions of middle-income jobs were lost to outsourcing or replaced by technology and salaries became more and more compressed. The average real weekly earnings of a typical blue collar worker are lower today than in 1964.
But the poverty problem is also about the fracturing of the American Dream, specifically the dream of upward mobility. It’s become increasingly hard for Americans to rise above the socioeconomic status of their birth, particularly compared with their peers in other rich nations. "Poverty is in many ways about a lack of social mobility," says Erin Currier, who studies these topics at the Pew Charitable Trusts. And research shows that even before the current crisis, Americans had much less mobility than people in many European nations. "We have a belief system and an idea about ourselves that don’t always align well with the facts," notes Isabel Sawhill, a co-director, with Haskins, of the Center on Children and Families at Brookings.
Now, in a world of high unemployment, lower wages and growing poverty, the fiction is becoming ever more difficult to sustain. This downturn marks the first period in 20 years in which employment as a percentage of population in the U.S. has fallen below the rate in countries like the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands. Indeed, downward mobility is so much a part of youth culture today that the Census Bureau has come up with a whole new lexicon for it, including the term doubling up, which describes households in which adult children who can’t afford life on their own return to live with their parents. An additional 3 million of them would be below the poverty line if they couldn’t crash with Mom and Dad.
That’s unlikely to change soon. Most U.S. job growth since the 1990s has been in sectors like education and government, which are facing big cuts. Meanwhile, 9 out of 10 of the biggest occupations in America offer less than the mean hourly wage. (Think salesclerks and home health aides.) Indeed, the Boomerang Generation is likely to become as demographically defining in the next few decades as the baby boomers have been. The two groups may very well end up in a political war for dwindling government benefits, as the elderly fight to keep entitlements like Social Security that ward off poverty and younger people push for spending on education and retraining to avoid falling into it.
While there’s no doubt that investment in education, which creates jobs and improves worker competitiveness, is a long-run solution, the key short-term weapon in the fight against poverty is tax policy. Poverty numbers would be far higher without tax breaks for the poor. The Obama Administration should keep fighting to extend initiatives like the earned-income tax credit, the largest and most effective antipoverty program. (Ronald Reagan used it to take millions out of poverty.) President Obama should also continue the pressure on the richest Americans to carry a larger share of the load. Despite congressional resistance, many wealthy people see it’s in their interest to foster a less divisive society. While Americans historically haven’t been as inclined as Europeans to riot over inequity (witness the protests that have taken place from London to Athens), it’s hard to rule that out in a world in which the American Dream is increasingly becoming a myth.
