The Ageの記事、'Toyota sackings harsh but fair, say experts' by Clay Lucas (April 18, 2012 - 1:08PM)から。
'TOYOTA'S method of sacking 350 of its workers has been questioned by a human resources expert, who said the process should have been handled more sensitively.
* sacking 解任、首にすること
But labour law academics believe the sackings appear to have been handled within the law, and that unfair dismissal claims being touted by sacked workers at the Altona plant are unlikely to succeed.
* being touted by ... ...によってもてはやされる、売り込まれる
Yesterday, Toyota completed the process of making one in 10 of its 3350 employees at its Altona plant forcibly redundant.
The sackings were flagged in January, but workers did not know who was going until Monday.
Toyota beefed up security at the plant and ferried sacked workers by mini-vans to an adjacent reception centre, where they were formally dismissed.
* beef up ... ...を強化する
They were also given a folder outlining the criteria for why they were losing their job.
Many of those sacked said these criteria had little relevance to how they had performed their job.
The Australian Human Resources Institute's national president, Peter Wilson, said there was never a ''100 per cent successful way'' of taking someone's job away. ''It can get pretty ugly.''
And while Toyota had tried to handle some things thoroughly, he said, it had not gone well.
''The cars steering people over to a hall, that is a little bit militaristic - that wasn't smart,'' he said.
Voluntary redundancies often did not work out well for companies because the best talent ended up leaving, he said, and the least productive who feared they could not find other work stayed.
Toyota's forced redundancy process had given workers an assessment process that had tried to be more honest than other companies often were, said Mr Wilson, whose organisation represents 18,000 Australian firms. ''A lot of employers don't go into the reasons.''
Employees can be made redundant if their company has operational reasons that mean their job is no longer required to be performed by anyone. Companies must also comply with consultation requirements.
Labour law experts said it appeared Toyota had adhered to laws around genuine redundancies. Associate Professor Anthony Forsyth, from Monash University, said some of the criteria outlined by Toyota in employee departure documents were unusual, but others seemed ''pretty legitimate and common''.
However, Toyota's blurring of past performance and possible misconduct with the redundancy process ''might open up the possibility of the employees' union challenging the terminations under the unfair dismissal laws''. It was likely Toyota could successfully defend those sorts of claims, he said.
Among those who lost their jobs was Fadi Hassan, who worked for Toyota for 16 years. A union delegate for 11 years, he said the assessment forms were fabricated to fit a prearranged list of those management wanted gone. ''Whether I was perfect or not, they would have gotten rid of me,'' he said.
He said 13 union representatives had been fired, leaving virtually no shop stewards on the factory floor.
The ''nasty'' process shocked Mr Hassan. ''I don't know how the hell I ended up working for a company like this. They wanted to force us to adopt a Japanese culture.''
Toyota spokeswoman Beck Angel said no one had been targeted in the redundancy process.'
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Monday, April 9, 2012
'Bank of Japan stands pat but seen keeping finger on trigger'
Reutersの記事、'Bank of Japan stands pat but seen keeping finger on trigger' (12:22am EDT) By Leika Kihara and Rie Ishiguroから。
'TOKYO (Reuters) - The Bank of Japan kept monetary policy steady as expected on Tuesday, holding off any new steps to help meet its new inflation target and boost activity ahead of a more thorough assessment of the economy later this month.
The decision was widely expected by markets, although the dollar still slid against the yen after the announcement on selling by traders who had speculated that the central bank could surprise them as it did in February.
The market view was BOJ policymakers would prefer to hold fire at least the next policy meeting on April 27, when revised long-term forecasts should show that a sustained end to deflation is a long way off, giving them justification to act.
* hold fire 批判を控える、事実を隠しておく、事実を他人に話さない
Traders are already factoring in a monetary easing in late April, as the government keeps up pressure for bolder steps to pull Japan out of deflation.
"The question now is not whether the BOJ could ease on April 27, but what the bank would do in taking further easing steps," said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at Norinchukin Research Institute in Tokyo.
"Inaction would upset politicians and disappoint markets, possibly sending the dollar below 80 yen."
Japan's economy has shown some signs of recovery on reconstruction spending after last year's earthquake. But business sentiment failed to match that improvement, the BOJ's recent tankan survey showed, suggesting that any recovery will be modest.
The BOJ maintained its assessment the economy is showing some signs of picking up but offered a cautious view on business sentiment, saying it was more or less flat.
PRESSURE REMAINS
The BOJ surprised markets in February by increasing its asset buying and loan scheme by 10 trillion yen ($121 billion) and setting a 1 percent inflation target. It held fire last month, as the yen's retreat from record highs and growing signs Japan is headed for a recovery give it some breathing space.
* give it some breathing space 熟考の機会を与える, に一息つかせる
But renewed expectations of further stimulus by the Federal Reserve, driven by Friday's disappointing U.S. jobs data, have nudged the yen to a one-month high against the dollar, keeping pressure on the BOJ to act again soon.
* nudge ～ ～を少しずつ動かす
Many on the BOJ board are ready to pull the trigger on any signs that the recovery is under threat. While they stick to the view the economy is picking up, they remain worried about risks such as slowing Chinese growth and high oil prices.
In a sign that political pressure has not subsided despite February's action, Economics Minister Motohisa Furukawa said on Tuesday he continued to expect the BOJ to take flexible, bold steps to achieve its 1 percent inflation target.
Finance Minister Jun Azumi also voiced hope for an easing this month, saying that April was key in gauging the outlook for Japan's economy because money set aside under the state budget for reconstruction from last year's earthquake will begin to flow through the economy.
"In April we have to build a solid base from which the economy can expand this year. We also have G20 meetings, and I think the BOJ will look at this closely and respond appropriately as needed," he told a news conference on Tuesday.
BOJ Governor Masaaki Shirakawa may face demands for more action when he attends, as an observer, a new government panel to discuss measures to overcome deflation, which will hold its first meeting by the end of this month.
The BOJ, knowing political pressure will persist, wants to time its action wisely. It now expects core consumer inflation of 0.1 percent for the fiscal year that began in April and 0.5 percent for the following year, well below the 1 percent target.
With few signs of domestic price pressures, the BOJ may find it hard to justify raising its inflation forecast on April 27 unless it is accompanied by another round of stimulus.
When the BOJ next acts, it will probably again expand its 65 trillion yen asset buying and loan program, mostly by committing to purchase more government bonds. In doing so, it may need to extend the maturity of bonds it buys under the program to five years from the current two-year timeframe as two-year yields are already stuck at 0.1 percent.
Azumi and Shirakawa are scheduled to attend the G20 finance leaders' meeting to be held in Washington next week.
($1 = 82.3700 Japanese yen)
(Additional reporting by Stanley White and Rie Ishiguro; Editing by Edmund Klamann and John Mair)
'TOKYO (Reuters) - The Bank of Japan kept monetary policy steady as expected on Tuesday, holding off any new steps to help meet its new inflation target and boost activity ahead of a more thorough assessment of the economy later this month.
The decision was widely expected by markets, although the dollar still slid against the yen after the announcement on selling by traders who had speculated that the central bank could surprise them as it did in February.
The market view was BOJ policymakers would prefer to hold fire at least the next policy meeting on April 27, when revised long-term forecasts should show that a sustained end to deflation is a long way off, giving them justification to act.
* hold fire 批判を控える、事実を隠しておく、事実を他人に話さない
Traders are already factoring in a monetary easing in late April, as the government keeps up pressure for bolder steps to pull Japan out of deflation.
"The question now is not whether the BOJ could ease on April 27, but what the bank would do in taking further easing steps," said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at Norinchukin Research Institute in Tokyo.
"Inaction would upset politicians and disappoint markets, possibly sending the dollar below 80 yen."
Japan's economy has shown some signs of recovery on reconstruction spending after last year's earthquake. But business sentiment failed to match that improvement, the BOJ's recent tankan survey showed, suggesting that any recovery will be modest.
The BOJ maintained its assessment the economy is showing some signs of picking up but offered a cautious view on business sentiment, saying it was more or less flat.
PRESSURE REMAINS
The BOJ surprised markets in February by increasing its asset buying and loan scheme by 10 trillion yen ($121 billion) and setting a 1 percent inflation target. It held fire last month, as the yen's retreat from record highs and growing signs Japan is headed for a recovery give it some breathing space.
* give it some breathing space 熟考の機会を与える, に一息つかせる
But renewed expectations of further stimulus by the Federal Reserve, driven by Friday's disappointing U.S. jobs data, have nudged the yen to a one-month high against the dollar, keeping pressure on the BOJ to act again soon.
* nudge ～ ～を少しずつ動かす
Many on the BOJ board are ready to pull the trigger on any signs that the recovery is under threat. While they stick to the view the economy is picking up, they remain worried about risks such as slowing Chinese growth and high oil prices.
In a sign that political pressure has not subsided despite February's action, Economics Minister Motohisa Furukawa said on Tuesday he continued to expect the BOJ to take flexible, bold steps to achieve its 1 percent inflation target.
Finance Minister Jun Azumi also voiced hope for an easing this month, saying that April was key in gauging the outlook for Japan's economy because money set aside under the state budget for reconstruction from last year's earthquake will begin to flow through the economy.
"In April we have to build a solid base from which the economy can expand this year. We also have G20 meetings, and I think the BOJ will look at this closely and respond appropriately as needed," he told a news conference on Tuesday.
BOJ Governor Masaaki Shirakawa may face demands for more action when he attends, as an observer, a new government panel to discuss measures to overcome deflation, which will hold its first meeting by the end of this month.
The BOJ, knowing political pressure will persist, wants to time its action wisely. It now expects core consumer inflation of 0.1 percent for the fiscal year that began in April and 0.5 percent for the following year, well below the 1 percent target.
With few signs of domestic price pressures, the BOJ may find it hard to justify raising its inflation forecast on April 27 unless it is accompanied by another round of stimulus.
When the BOJ next acts, it will probably again expand its 65 trillion yen asset buying and loan program, mostly by committing to purchase more government bonds. In doing so, it may need to extend the maturity of bonds it buys under the program to five years from the current two-year timeframe as two-year yields are already stuck at 0.1 percent.
Azumi and Shirakawa are scheduled to attend the G20 finance leaders' meeting to be held in Washington next week.
($1 = 82.3700 Japanese yen)
(Additional reporting by Stanley White and Rie Ishiguro; Editing by Edmund Klamann and John Mair)
Saturday, April 7, 2012
大学という教育機関が人に与える影響力は数値化できるのか？
NYTの記事、'Trying to Find a Measure for How Well Colleges Do' By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑAから。
'How well does a college teach, and what do its students learn? Rankings based on the credentials of entering freshmen are not hard to find, but how can students, parents and policy makers assess how well a college builds on that foundation?
What information exists has often been hidden from public view. But that may be changing.
In the wake of the No Child Left Behind federal education law, students in elementary, middle and high schools take standardized tests whose results are made public, inviting anyone to assess, however imperfectly, a school’s performance. There is no comparable trove of public data for judging and comparing colleges.
Pieces of such a system may be taking shape, however, with several kinds of national assessments — including, most controversially, standardized tests — gaining traction in recent years. More than 1,000 colleges may be using at least one of them.
“There’s a real shift in attitudes under way,” said David C. Paris, executive director of the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, a coalition of higher education groups. “We used to hear a lot more of, ‘The value of college can’t be measured,’ and now we hear more of, ‘Let’s talk about how we can measure.’ ”
＊ under way 〔計画・作業などが〕進行中で
In January, the New Leadership Alliance released guidelines calling on colleges to systematically “gather evidence of student learning” — though not explicitly advocating standardized tests — and release the results. The report was endorsed by several major organizations of colleges and universities.
Advocates say the point is not to measure how each college’s students perform after four years, which depends heavily on the caliber of students it enrolls in the first place, but to see how much they improve along the way. The concern is less about measuring knowledge of chemistry or literature than about harder to define skills like critical thinking and problem-solving.'
＊ caliber 〔人の〕力量、器量、手腕
'How well does a college teach, and what do its students learn? Rankings based on the credentials of entering freshmen are not hard to find, but how can students, parents and policy makers assess how well a college builds on that foundation?
What information exists has often been hidden from public view. But that may be changing.
In the wake of the No Child Left Behind federal education law, students in elementary, middle and high schools take standardized tests whose results are made public, inviting anyone to assess, however imperfectly, a school’s performance. There is no comparable trove of public data for judging and comparing colleges.
Pieces of such a system may be taking shape, however, with several kinds of national assessments — including, most controversially, standardized tests — gaining traction in recent years. More than 1,000 colleges may be using at least one of them.
“There’s a real shift in attitudes under way,” said David C. Paris, executive director of the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, a coalition of higher education groups. “We used to hear a lot more of, ‘The value of college can’t be measured,’ and now we hear more of, ‘Let’s talk about how we can measure.’ ”
＊ under way 〔計画・作業などが〕進行中で
In January, the New Leadership Alliance released guidelines calling on colleges to systematically “gather evidence of student learning” — though not explicitly advocating standardized tests — and release the results. The report was endorsed by several major organizations of colleges and universities.
Advocates say the point is not to measure how each college’s students perform after four years, which depends heavily on the caliber of students it enrolls in the first place, but to see how much they improve along the way. The concern is less about measuring knowledge of chemistry or literature than about harder to define skills like critical thinking and problem-solving.'
＊ caliber 〔人の〕力量、器量、手腕
Friday, April 6, 2012
'Autistic workers: loyal, talented … ignored'
The guardian記事、'Autistic workers: loyal, talented … ignored'Lynne Wallis (Friday 6 April 2012 22.57)
'Penny Andrews has a long CV for a 31-year-old. Her first job as an editorial assistant ended with her in a disciplinary hearing for publicly discussing colleagues' pay rises. Her next employer let her go for lacking initiative, while yet another insisted she had no common sense and was "ditzy". Both are inaccurate, she insists.
* ditzy 頭の弱い、ぼけてる
Andrews comes across as sharp and self-aware, with a perceptive intelligence. Currently studying for a degree in IT and communications with the Open University, she recalls: "I never fitted in. I was an observer rather than part of the team – 'the tribe' as I thought of them – because I never understood the unwritten rules."
The source of her difficulties was a mystery to everyone including her, until she was diagnosed with autism last year – late diagnosis is typical of females with autism which includes Asperger syndrome. Andrews says she always knew she was different and that the diagnosis was a relief.
"I just thought I was a terrible person who couldn't make a job, or anything else, work out. I dropped out of two previous university degree courses because of similar problems around fitting in and communication," she says.
"Now that I understand more about myself and my autism, I want to raise awareness among employers of what it is; that it isn't a bad thing, just a different thing. I would love a job that took my skills and harnessed them, because of who I am, and what I am, rather than in spite of it."
She says she can be "bubbly" if she tries really hard, but it exhausts her as it is learned behaviour rather than something that comes naturally. "If I was myself, everyone would think I was a boring cow."
Andrews, who wants to secure a place on a graduate scheme for librarianship when she has finished her degree, is one of 100 ambassadors for the National Autistic Society (NAS) and is helping promote its new Undiscovered Workforce campaign.
Launched in the House of Commons in March, with cross-party support, the campaign is aiming to increase employment opportunities. "We need MPs to help us show how much people like me have to contribute," she says. "One in every 100 of their constituents has autism, after all."
Job interviews are a huge barrier to employment because of the requirement for good communications skills. Just 15% of those with autism have full-time jobs according to NAS research, while another 9% are in part-time work. These figures compare unfavourably with the 31% of all disabled people in full-time work in the UK, while more then a quarter of all graduates with autism are unemployed, the highest rate of any disability group nationally.
The key difficulties are social interaction, establishing relationships, lack of emotional reciprocation (which can give an impression of indifference), difficulty with flexibility of thought, forward planning and thinking in abstract ways. The upside, however, is equally considerable.
* reciprocation 返すこと
According to Jane Asher, who is president of NAS, autistic people often make better employees than those known in the word of autism as "neuro-typicals" – ie, the rest of us. She explains: "People with autism tend to be very reliable and punctual. They like routine, and most won't mind doing repetitive tasks. Many are very good with maps and figures. They are usually scrupulously honest – they just don't have the guile to be anything else, and they can't lie.
"There is a huge lack of imagination on the part of employers who are missing out massively by ignoring this untapped pool of labour."
'Penny Andrews has a long CV for a 31-year-old. Her first job as an editorial assistant ended with her in a disciplinary hearing for publicly discussing colleagues' pay rises. Her next employer let her go for lacking initiative, while yet another insisted she had no common sense and was "ditzy". Both are inaccurate, she insists.
* ditzy 頭の弱い、ぼけてる
Andrews comes across as sharp and self-aware, with a perceptive intelligence. Currently studying for a degree in IT and communications with the Open University, she recalls: "I never fitted in. I was an observer rather than part of the team – 'the tribe' as I thought of them – because I never understood the unwritten rules."
The source of her difficulties was a mystery to everyone including her, until she was diagnosed with autism last year – late diagnosis is typical of females with autism which includes Asperger syndrome. Andrews says she always knew she was different and that the diagnosis was a relief.
"I just thought I was a terrible person who couldn't make a job, or anything else, work out. I dropped out of two previous university degree courses because of similar problems around fitting in and communication," she says.
"Now that I understand more about myself and my autism, I want to raise awareness among employers of what it is; that it isn't a bad thing, just a different thing. I would love a job that took my skills and harnessed them, because of who I am, and what I am, rather than in spite of it."
She says she can be "bubbly" if she tries really hard, but it exhausts her as it is learned behaviour rather than something that comes naturally. "If I was myself, everyone would think I was a boring cow."
Andrews, who wants to secure a place on a graduate scheme for librarianship when she has finished her degree, is one of 100 ambassadors for the National Autistic Society (NAS) and is helping promote its new Undiscovered Workforce campaign.
Launched in the House of Commons in March, with cross-party support, the campaign is aiming to increase employment opportunities. "We need MPs to help us show how much people like me have to contribute," she says. "One in every 100 of their constituents has autism, after all."
Job interviews are a huge barrier to employment because of the requirement for good communications skills. Just 15% of those with autism have full-time jobs according to NAS research, while another 9% are in part-time work. These figures compare unfavourably with the 31% of all disabled people in full-time work in the UK, while more then a quarter of all graduates with autism are unemployed, the highest rate of any disability group nationally.
The key difficulties are social interaction, establishing relationships, lack of emotional reciprocation (which can give an impression of indifference), difficulty with flexibility of thought, forward planning and thinking in abstract ways. The upside, however, is equally considerable.
* reciprocation 返すこと
According to Jane Asher, who is president of NAS, autistic people often make better employees than those known in the word of autism as "neuro-typicals" – ie, the rest of us. She explains: "People with autism tend to be very reliable and punctual. They like routine, and most won't mind doing repetitive tasks. Many are very good with maps and figures. They are usually scrupulously honest – they just don't have the guile to be anything else, and they can't lie.
"There is a huge lack of imagination on the part of employers who are missing out massively by ignoring this untapped pool of labour."
'Scientists Link Gene Mutation to Autism Risk'
NYTの記事、'Scientists Link Gene Mutation to Autism Risk' By BENEDICT CAREY (April 4, 2012)から。
'Teams of scientists working independently have for the first time identified several gene mutations that they agree sharply increase the chances that a child will develop autism. They have found further evidence that the risk increases with the age of the parents, particularly in fathers over age 35.
The gene mutations are extremely rare and together account for a tiny fraction of autism cases — in these studies, only a handful of children. Experts said the new research gave scientists something they had not had: a clear strategy for building some understanding of the disease’s biological basis.
Scientists have been debating the relative influence of inherited risk and environmental factors in autism for decades, and few today doubt that there is a strong genetic component.
But biologists have groped in vain for a reliable way to clarify the underlying genetics of these so-called autism spectrum disorders, including Asperger syndrome and related social difficulties that are being diagnosed at alarmingly high rates — on average, in one in 88 children, according to a government estimate released last week.
* grope～ ～を手探りして見つける
Previous studies have produced a scattering of gene findings but little consensus or confidence in how to proceed.
The new research — reported in three papers posted online on Wednesday in the journal Nature — provides some measure of both, some experts said. There are probably hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, gene variations that could disrupt brain development enough to result in social delays.
An intensified search for rare mutations could turn up enough of these to account for 15 percent to 20 percent of all autism cases, some experts say, and allow researchers a chance to see patterns and some possible mechanisms to explain what goes awry.
* go awry つまずく、失敗する、
“These studies aren’t so much a breakthrough, because we knew this was coming,” said Jonathan Sebat, a professor of psychiatry and cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who was not a part of the research teams. “But I’d say it’s a turning point. We now have a reliable way forward, and I think it’s fair to expect that we will find 20, 30, maybe more such mutations in the next year or two.”
Other researchers were more cautious, saying that the genetics of rare mutations was not yet well enough understood to make conclusive statements about their effect on the behavior of specific genes.
“This is a great beginning, and I’m impressed with the work, but we don’t know the cause of these rare mutations, or even their levels in the general population,” said Aravinda Chakravarti of the Institute of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, who was not involved in the studies. “I’m not saying it’s not worth it to follow up these findings, but I am saying it’s going to be a hard slog.”
* slog 長くつらい仕事
The three research teams took a similar approach, analyzing genetic material taken from blood samples of families in which parents who have no signs of autism give birth to a child who develops the disorder. This approach gives scientists the opportunity to spot the initial mutations that accompany the condition, rather than trying to work though possible genetic contributions from maternal and paternal lines. In all three studies, the researchers focused on rare genetic glitches called de novo mutations.
De novo mutations are not inherited but occur spontaneously near or during conception. Most people have at least one, and the majority of them are harmless.
In one of the new studies, Dr. Matthew W. State, a professor of genetics and child psychiatry at Yale, led a team that looked for de novo mutations in 200 people who had been given an autism diagnosis, as well as in parents and siblings who showed no signs of the disorder. The team found that two unrelated children with autism in the study had de novo mutations in the same gene — and nothing similar in those without a diagnosis.
“That is like throwing a dart at a dart board with 21,000 spots and hitting the same one twice,” Dr. State said. “The chances that this gene is related to autism risk is something like 99.9999 percent.”'
'Teams of scientists working independently have for the first time identified several gene mutations that they agree sharply increase the chances that a child will develop autism. They have found further evidence that the risk increases with the age of the parents, particularly in fathers over age 35.
The gene mutations are extremely rare and together account for a tiny fraction of autism cases — in these studies, only a handful of children. Experts said the new research gave scientists something they had not had: a clear strategy for building some understanding of the disease’s biological basis.
Scientists have been debating the relative influence of inherited risk and environmental factors in autism for decades, and few today doubt that there is a strong genetic component.
But biologists have groped in vain for a reliable way to clarify the underlying genetics of these so-called autism spectrum disorders, including Asperger syndrome and related social difficulties that are being diagnosed at alarmingly high rates — on average, in one in 88 children, according to a government estimate released last week.
* grope～ ～を手探りして見つける
Previous studies have produced a scattering of gene findings but little consensus or confidence in how to proceed.
The new research — reported in three papers posted online on Wednesday in the journal Nature — provides some measure of both, some experts said. There are probably hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, gene variations that could disrupt brain development enough to result in social delays.
An intensified search for rare mutations could turn up enough of these to account for 15 percent to 20 percent of all autism cases, some experts say, and allow researchers a chance to see patterns and some possible mechanisms to explain what goes awry.
* go awry つまずく、失敗する、
“These studies aren’t so much a breakthrough, because we knew this was coming,” said Jonathan Sebat, a professor of psychiatry and cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who was not a part of the research teams. “But I’d say it’s a turning point. We now have a reliable way forward, and I think it’s fair to expect that we will find 20, 30, maybe more such mutations in the next year or two.”
Other researchers were more cautious, saying that the genetics of rare mutations was not yet well enough understood to make conclusive statements about their effect on the behavior of specific genes.
“This is a great beginning, and I’m impressed with the work, but we don’t know the cause of these rare mutations, or even their levels in the general population,” said Aravinda Chakravarti of the Institute of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, who was not involved in the studies. “I’m not saying it’s not worth it to follow up these findings, but I am saying it’s going to be a hard slog.”
* slog 長くつらい仕事
The three research teams took a similar approach, analyzing genetic material taken from blood samples of families in which parents who have no signs of autism give birth to a child who develops the disorder. This approach gives scientists the opportunity to spot the initial mutations that accompany the condition, rather than trying to work though possible genetic contributions from maternal and paternal lines. In all three studies, the researchers focused on rare genetic glitches called de novo mutations.
De novo mutations are not inherited but occur spontaneously near or during conception. Most people have at least one, and the majority of them are harmless.
In one of the new studies, Dr. Matthew W. State, a professor of genetics and child psychiatry at Yale, led a team that looked for de novo mutations in 200 people who had been given an autism diagnosis, as well as in parents and siblings who showed no signs of the disorder. The team found that two unrelated children with autism in the study had de novo mutations in the same gene — and nothing similar in those without a diagnosis.
“That is like throwing a dart at a dart board with 21,000 spots and hitting the same one twice,” Dr. State said. “The chances that this gene is related to autism risk is something like 99.9999 percent.”'
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
この発明どう思います？: 'Google unveils Project Glass augmented reality eyewear'
BBCの記事、'Google unveils Project Glass augmented reality eyewear' (4 April 2012 Last updated at 19:50 GMT)から。
'Google has revealed details of its research into augmented reality glasses.
It posted a brief introduction to Project Glass, photos and a concept video at its Google+ social network.
The images show a minimalist design with a microphone and partly-transparent video screen that places information over the view from the users' right eye.
The product's developers said they wanted feedback on the idea.
They did not give any indication about when the device might go on sale or what it would cost.
"A group of us... started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment," said a statement from Google X - the firm's experimental lab.
"We're sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input."
Guided walks
The video suggests icons offering 14 different services will be offered to the user when the glasses are first put on, including information about the weather, their location and diary appointments.
It appears that several of these services are either triggered by an action taken by the user or the situation they are in.
The film shows one user being reminded he has a date that evening when he looks up at a blank wall, and then warns him that there is a 10% chance it will rain when he looks out of the window.
An alert pops up when a friend sends a text asking if he wants to meet up later in the day. When the user dictates a reply a microphone symbol is superimposed over much of his view.
＊ superimpose 〔文字・画像などを別の画像に〕重ね（合わせ）る
Other functions include Google Maps showing a route to the wearer's destination with small arrows keeping him on track, the ability to take a photo of what he is looking at with an option to share it with friends, and a video conference service.
The glasses are also shown to allow music and other audio to be heard, although they do not appear to include earphones.'
+++写真はBBCのサイトからお借りしました+++
'Google has revealed details of its research into augmented reality glasses.
It posted a brief introduction to Project Glass, photos and a concept video at its Google+ social network.
The images show a minimalist design with a microphone and partly-transparent video screen that places information over the view from the users' right eye.
The product's developers said they wanted feedback on the idea.
They did not give any indication about when the device might go on sale or what it would cost.
"A group of us... started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment," said a statement from Google X - the firm's experimental lab.
"We're sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input."
Guided walks
The video suggests icons offering 14 different services will be offered to the user when the glasses are first put on, including information about the weather, their location and diary appointments.
It appears that several of these services are either triggered by an action taken by the user or the situation they are in.
The film shows one user being reminded he has a date that evening when he looks up at a blank wall, and then warns him that there is a 10% chance it will rain when he looks out of the window.
An alert pops up when a friend sends a text asking if he wants to meet up later in the day. When the user dictates a reply a microphone symbol is superimposed over much of his view.
＊ superimpose 〔文字・画像などを別の画像に〕重ね（合わせ）る
Other functions include Google Maps showing a route to the wearer's destination with small arrows keeping him on track, the ability to take a photo of what he is looking at with an option to share it with friends, and a video conference service.
The glasses are also shown to allow music and other audio to be heard, although they do not appear to include earphones.'
+++写真はBBCのサイトからお借りしました+++
Monday, April 2, 2012
日本、低迷からどう抜け出すか？
Reutersの記事、'Insight: Dynamic CEOs defy Japan Inc's decline' By Linda Sieg and James Topham（Mon Apr 2, 2012 6:06pm EDT）から。
'When Yusaku Maezawa quit playing drums in a punk band to devote himself full-time to his business selling Tokyo street fashion on the Internet, his main goal was to have fun.
Twelve years later, Maezawa, 36, is the billionaire CEO of online fashion retailer Start Today, one of a clutch of growing firms led by a different breed of executives determined to avoid the errors of the global Japanese brands whose faltering fortunes are making Japan Inc synonymous with decline.
* clutch 手中
* faltering 低迷している
"I was in danger of becoming a 'salaryman musician'," Maezawa said in an interview at his company headquarters in a high-rise office building outside Tokyo, where framed T-shirts hand-sprayed by company executives with letters spelling out "NO WAR" adorn the entrance.
"On the other hand, the company was growing dynamically, I was meeting new people to work with and I heard customers were happy, so it felt like there was more dynamism and growth," added Maezawa, who named his firm for an album by punk band Gorilla Biscuits.
The company, which now has about 400 full-time employees, expects operating profits to rise by more than 46 percent to 8.56 billion yen ($104 million) in the year just ended.
Maezawa, whose firm listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's start-up section in 2007 and graduated to the first section in February, may be rare in preaching fun as a management gospel.
* preach 〜を説き勧める
"I want to destroy the old concept that a company is a place where one sacrifices time for the sake of money," he said with an impish grin, confessing he now works a four-day week.
* impish 小鬼の（ような）、いたずらな
But his commitment to innovation and a laser-like focus on making consumers happy are shared traits experts agree set off Japan's emerging successes from once-proud but now-struggling firms such as Sony and Panasonic.
And it's not just those storied electronics groups that are at risk of being left behind in today's fast changing world. The stock market barometer, the Nikkei average, has dropped 74 percent from the heady highs of late-1989.
"Many people just rely on their past success, but things are moving and changing so fast, you need to self-innovate," Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of e-commerce operator and Amazon rival Rakuten Inc, told Reuters in a telephone interview as he travelled by car through Tokyo.'
'When Yusaku Maezawa quit playing drums in a punk band to devote himself full-time to his business selling Tokyo street fashion on the Internet, his main goal was to have fun.
Twelve years later, Maezawa, 36, is the billionaire CEO of online fashion retailer Start Today, one of a clutch of growing firms led by a different breed of executives determined to avoid the errors of the global Japanese brands whose faltering fortunes are making Japan Inc synonymous with decline.
* clutch 手中
* faltering 低迷している
"I was in danger of becoming a 'salaryman musician'," Maezawa said in an interview at his company headquarters in a high-rise office building outside Tokyo, where framed T-shirts hand-sprayed by company executives with letters spelling out "NO WAR" adorn the entrance.
"On the other hand, the company was growing dynamically, I was meeting new people to work with and I heard customers were happy, so it felt like there was more dynamism and growth," added Maezawa, who named his firm for an album by punk band Gorilla Biscuits.
The company, which now has about 400 full-time employees, expects operating profits to rise by more than 46 percent to 8.56 billion yen ($104 million) in the year just ended.
Maezawa, whose firm listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's start-up section in 2007 and graduated to the first section in February, may be rare in preaching fun as a management gospel.
* preach 〜を説き勧める
"I want to destroy the old concept that a company is a place where one sacrifices time for the sake of money," he said with an impish grin, confessing he now works a four-day week.
* impish 小鬼の（ような）、いたずらな
But his commitment to innovation and a laser-like focus on making consumers happy are shared traits experts agree set off Japan's emerging successes from once-proud but now-struggling firms such as Sony and Panasonic.
And it's not just those storied electronics groups that are at risk of being left behind in today's fast changing world. The stock market barometer, the Nikkei average, has dropped 74 percent from the heady highs of late-1989.
"Many people just rely on their past success, but things are moving and changing so fast, you need to self-innovate," Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of e-commerce operator and Amazon rival Rakuten Inc, told Reuters in a telephone interview as he travelled by car through Tokyo.'
Friday, March 30, 2012
Adrienne Rich
NYTの記事、'A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism' By MARGALIT FOXから。
'Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.
* unswerving 〔考え方・気持ち・信念などが非常に強くて〕変わらない、揺るぎない、動じない、不動の
The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, with which she had lived for most of her adult life, her family said.
* rheumatoid arthritis 関節リウマチ
Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.
Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.
She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.
* stifling 抑圧的な、重苦しい、息が詰まるような
For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets.
* indissolubly 〔関係などが〕永続的に
* unflagging 疲れを知らない、衰えない、不撓不屈の
All this helped ensure Ms. Rich’s continued relevance long after she burst genteelly onto the scene as a Radcliffe senior in the early 1950s.
* genteelly 上品に
Her constellation of honors includes a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1994 and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for “Diving Into the Wreck.” That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork.
In the title poem, Ms. Rich uses the metaphor of a dive into dark, unfathomable waters to plumb the depths of women’s experience:
* unfathomable 〔海などが〕深さが測れない、〔考えなどが〕理解し難い、深淵な
I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold. ...
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.'
＊アルクオンライン辞書出典
'Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.
* unswerving 〔考え方・気持ち・信念などが非常に強くて〕変わらない、揺るぎない、動じない、不動の
The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, with which she had lived for most of her adult life, her family said.
* rheumatoid arthritis 関節リウマチ
Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.
Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.
She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.
* stifling 抑圧的な、重苦しい、息が詰まるような
For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets.
* indissolubly 〔関係などが〕永続的に
* unflagging 疲れを知らない、衰えない、不撓不屈の
All this helped ensure Ms. Rich’s continued relevance long after she burst genteelly onto the scene as a Radcliffe senior in the early 1950s.
* genteelly 上品に
Her constellation of honors includes a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1994 and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for “Diving Into the Wreck.” That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork.
In the title poem, Ms. Rich uses the metaphor of a dive into dark, unfathomable waters to plumb the depths of women’s experience:
* unfathomable 〔海などが〕深さが測れない、〔考えなどが〕理解し難い、深淵な
I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold. ...
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.'
＊アルクオンライン辞書出典
Friday, March 23, 2012
’Lawmakers ask app makers for privacy information’
Reuterの記事、'Lawmakers ask app makers for privacy information'（Mar 22 2012）By Gerry Shihから。
'Lawmakers sent letters on Thursday requesting information from more than 30 popular iPhone applications developers as part of an inquiry into how software companies collect private consumer data.
Recipients of the letter, including Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Path, were asked to provide information about the user data that is collected when consumers download their apps -- and how that data is used.
The letter came after several popular apps, including Path, the social networking tool, were found accessing and uploading address book data from users' iPhones without permission, sparking a massive online controversy last month.
* spark a controversy 議論の引き金となる、物議を醸す
Representatives Henry Waxman and G.K. Butterfield, two Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent the letter to 33 developers that had apps listed under the "iPhone Essential" area, a digital storefront curated by Apple in its App Store. The app makers have until April 12 to respond.
Apple, which was included as a recipient to the most recent letter, has also been tarnished by the scrutiny cast on its app makers; the iPhone and iPad maker has long said it subjects its app developers to a strict review before allowing new products into the App Store.
* tarnish 〔名声・名誉・評判などを〕汚す、傷つける、落とす
After the address book controversy emerged last month, Waxman and Butterfield sent a similar letter to Apple to request information about its App Store's consumer protection policies.
The apps inquiry is part of a broader tide of interest gathering on Capitol Hill around Internet privacy issues. In January, legislators including Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts criticized Google's plans to consolidate its privacy policies, saying it potentially violated a 2010 agreement that the web giant had struck with the Federal Trade Commission to improve its privacy policies.
(Reporting By Gerry Shih in San Francisco; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
'Lawmakers sent letters on Thursday requesting information from more than 30 popular iPhone applications developers as part of an inquiry into how software companies collect private consumer data.
Recipients of the letter, including Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Path, were asked to provide information about the user data that is collected when consumers download their apps -- and how that data is used.
The letter came after several popular apps, including Path, the social networking tool, were found accessing and uploading address book data from users' iPhones without permission, sparking a massive online controversy last month.
* spark a controversy 議論の引き金となる、物議を醸す
Representatives Henry Waxman and G.K. Butterfield, two Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent the letter to 33 developers that had apps listed under the "iPhone Essential" area, a digital storefront curated by Apple in its App Store. The app makers have until April 12 to respond.
Apple, which was included as a recipient to the most recent letter, has also been tarnished by the scrutiny cast on its app makers; the iPhone and iPad maker has long said it subjects its app developers to a strict review before allowing new products into the App Store.
* tarnish 〔名声・名誉・評判などを〕汚す、傷つける、落とす
After the address book controversy emerged last month, Waxman and Butterfield sent a similar letter to Apple to request information about its App Store's consumer protection policies.
The apps inquiry is part of a broader tide of interest gathering on Capitol Hill around Internet privacy issues. In January, legislators including Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts criticized Google's plans to consolidate its privacy policies, saying it potentially violated a 2010 agreement that the web giant had struck with the Federal Trade Commission to improve its privacy policies.
(Reporting By Gerry Shih in San Francisco; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
Thursday, March 15, 2012
'Loose cultures and free women'
Reuter.comの記事、'Loose cultures and free women' By Chrystia Freeland(March 15, 2012)から。
'With hindsight, we may find that the 2016 U.S. presidential race began last week, when Hillary Rodham Clinton made a politically electrifying point. ‘‘Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me,’’ she said at the Women in the World conference in New York. ‘‘But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women.’’
At a time when birth control has re-emerged as a political issue in the United States, 94 years after the first legal ruling to permit it, Clinton’s comments were an inspiring rallying cry for worried American women. But what about the mystery she identified? Why, as the secretary of state asserted, do extremists, from the Taliban to conservative Christians, want to control women?
An intriguing new study by two professors at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto suggests a possible answer. (Disclosure: I am on the school’s Dean’s Advisory Board.) Soo Min Toh and Geoffrey Leonardelli didn’t set out to discover why extremists want to control women. Their question was more familiar: Why aren’t there more female leaders?
Toh and Leonardelli argue that women are held back by ‘‘tight’’ cultures and can emerge more easily as leaders in ‘‘loose’’ cultures. ‘‘Tight’’ cultures are ones that have clear, rigid rules about how people should behave and impose tough sanctions on those who color outside the lines. Socially conformist, homogeneous societies like Japan, Malaysia, Norway and Pakistan are tight cultures.
* be held back 〔行動を〕（差し）控えさせられる、自制させられる、思いとどまらせられる。
Tight cultures, Toh and Leonardelli believe, hold women back because ‘‘cultural tightness provokes a resistance to changing the traditional and widespread view that leadership is masculine.’’
Loose cultures, by contrast, do not have clear norms and are more tolerant of deviation from the rules. Heterogeneous societies and countries in the midst of social and political transition, like Australia, Israel, the Netherlands and Ukraine, are loose cultures.
These are cultures in which ‘‘societal members tend to be more open to change, and this openness may become manifest in changing expectations and attitudes about the masculinity of leadership.’’
Here is where Clinton’s mystery comes in. Tight cultures are not necessarily sexist ones — witness the inclusion of Norway on the list. But extremist subcultures are certainly tight cultures, and they are built on historical assumptions of male dominance. The perspective of Toh and Leonardelli helps to explain why these rigid ideologies are so fixated on keeping women down.
* keep ... down ...を低くしておく
But what about the places like Norway: tight cultures where women do extremely well? Toh and Leonardelli’s answer to that apparent paradox is that where there has been a top-down decision to support female leaders, tight cultures are very good at executing that directive. That is because these societies are effective at acting on the collective will. If the decision is made to elevate women, tight societies will implement it.
‘‘Although a culturally tight country, Norway ranks high in terms of gender egalitarianism,’’ the study’s authors point out. In Norway, egalitarianism is not a rebellion against prevailing cultural norms. It is, instead, what Norway’s new top-down consensus requires: ‘‘Norway has among the most ambitious equal opportunity legislation in the world that legally requires firms to reach a 40 percent women board representation by 2017.’’'
'With hindsight, we may find that the 2016 U.S. presidential race began last week, when Hillary Rodham Clinton made a politically electrifying point. ‘‘Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me,’’ she said at the Women in the World conference in New York. ‘‘But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women.’’
At a time when birth control has re-emerged as a political issue in the United States, 94 years after the first legal ruling to permit it, Clinton’s comments were an inspiring rallying cry for worried American women. But what about the mystery she identified? Why, as the secretary of state asserted, do extremists, from the Taliban to conservative Christians, want to control women?
An intriguing new study by two professors at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto suggests a possible answer. (Disclosure: I am on the school’s Dean’s Advisory Board.) Soo Min Toh and Geoffrey Leonardelli didn’t set out to discover why extremists want to control women. Their question was more familiar: Why aren’t there more female leaders?
Toh and Leonardelli argue that women are held back by ‘‘tight’’ cultures and can emerge more easily as leaders in ‘‘loose’’ cultures. ‘‘Tight’’ cultures are ones that have clear, rigid rules about how people should behave and impose tough sanctions on those who color outside the lines. Socially conformist, homogeneous societies like Japan, Malaysia, Norway and Pakistan are tight cultures.
* be held back 〔行動を〕（差し）控えさせられる、自制させられる、思いとどまらせられる。
Tight cultures, Toh and Leonardelli believe, hold women back because ‘‘cultural tightness provokes a resistance to changing the traditional and widespread view that leadership is masculine.’’
Loose cultures, by contrast, do not have clear norms and are more tolerant of deviation from the rules. Heterogeneous societies and countries in the midst of social and political transition, like Australia, Israel, the Netherlands and Ukraine, are loose cultures.
These are cultures in which ‘‘societal members tend to be more open to change, and this openness may become manifest in changing expectations and attitudes about the masculinity of leadership.’’
Here is where Clinton’s mystery comes in. Tight cultures are not necessarily sexist ones — witness the inclusion of Norway on the list. But extremist subcultures are certainly tight cultures, and they are built on historical assumptions of male dominance. The perspective of Toh and Leonardelli helps to explain why these rigid ideologies are so fixated on keeping women down.
* keep ... down ...を低くしておく
But what about the places like Norway: tight cultures where women do extremely well? Toh and Leonardelli’s answer to that apparent paradox is that where there has been a top-down decision to support female leaders, tight cultures are very good at executing that directive. That is because these societies are effective at acting on the collective will. If the decision is made to elevate women, tight societies will implement it.
‘‘Although a culturally tight country, Norway ranks high in terms of gender egalitarianism,’’ the study’s authors point out. In Norway, egalitarianism is not a rebellion against prevailing cultural norms. It is, instead, what Norway’s new top-down consensus requires: ‘‘Norway has among the most ambitious equal opportunity legislation in the world that legally requires firms to reach a 40 percent women board representation by 2017.’’'
Friday, March 9, 2012
豪州ウラン採掘、どうなる？
The Ageの記事、'Uranium on rise as dust settles on Fukushima' by Peter Ker (March 10, 2012)から。
'Nuclear may remain the only answer in a future where nations want energy without greenhouse gas emissions.
As the Friday afternoon shadows grew longer, Michael Jones thought the $10 million deal was in the bag.
* be in the bag 〔成功・契約などが〕確定して、確実で、間違いなしで、保証されて
The Impact Minerals boss had spent months negotiating a farm-in to the company's uranium deposit in Botswana, and finally the planets looked set to align.
''We were on the verge of what would've been a significant deal for us,'' he said, declining to name the suitor. ''They were going to leverage off their share price for the cash involved in that deal.''
But, just as the working week was drawing to a close that March afternoon, the deal suddenly changed.
Seven towering waves 15 metres high smashed into the eastern coast of Japan, claiming thousands of lives, homes and towns.
A nuclear power station was famously among the collateral damage and, while he was safe in Perth, Jones knew that he too would be affected by the catastrophe.
''I thought this is just gonna be a disaster for us,'' he recalled.
With a partial meltdown in progress at the Fukushima power station, the uranium sector would soon be swamped by the killer tsunamis, and Impact's Botswana deal was swept away with it.
''It basically disappeared over that weekend,'' Jones said.
A year on, the Fukushima disaster continues to weigh heavily on the industry, but an increasing number of investors believe the time is right to wade back into the uranium sector.
* weigh heavily on ... ～に重くのしかかる、～に重荷になる
It's no secret that uranium stocks fell off a cliff following the Fukushima failure. More than $1.5 billion was wiped of the value of ASX-listed uranium plays on the first day of trading after the disaster.
Paladin Energy and ERA lost more than $1 billion of that and within six months both companies - aided by troubles in Europe and a few self-inflicted wounds - had shrunk to barely 20 per cent of their former selves.
The spot price for uranium fell sharply, and a round of impairment charges swept through the industry.
* impairment 損傷を与えること
But the impact was most profound at the junior end of the market, where the fallout from Fukushima changed companies.
In an unfortunate collision between marketing and timing, Renaissance Uranium listed just three months prior to Fukushima as a ''pure-play'' uranium stock. Within months those ambitions had changed, and managing director David Christensen now describes the company as a ''broad based minerals exploration company''.
Renaissance is not the only uranium play now scouring its tenements for traces of other minerals to help pay the bills until uranium recovers.
Prior to Fukushima, Thundelarra Exploration had been devoting about 75 per cent of its time and money to developing uranium assets, but these days it spends more time talking about copper and gold.
''We have scaled right back on uranium … the company will be spending 10 per cent or 15 per cent of its effort on uranium this year and the rest would be predominantly copper and gold,'' said Brett Lambert, who stood down as managing director of Thundelarra this week. ''From a technical perspective it's not the right thing to do but from a market reality it's the only way to go forward.''
The trend repeated through the many company presentations at last month's Paydirt uranium conference in Adelaide, prompting one industry veteran to quip that copper and gold had never before enjoyed so much airtime at a conference devoted to uranium.
Many analysts and funds managers believe the punishment handed out to the uranium sector after Fukushima was overly severe.'
'Nuclear may remain the only answer in a future where nations want energy without greenhouse gas emissions.
As the Friday afternoon shadows grew longer, Michael Jones thought the $10 million deal was in the bag.
* be in the bag 〔成功・契約などが〕確定して、確実で、間違いなしで、保証されて
The Impact Minerals boss had spent months negotiating a farm-in to the company's uranium deposit in Botswana, and finally the planets looked set to align.
''We were on the verge of what would've been a significant deal for us,'' he said, declining to name the suitor. ''They were going to leverage off their share price for the cash involved in that deal.''
But, just as the working week was drawing to a close that March afternoon, the deal suddenly changed.
Seven towering waves 15 metres high smashed into the eastern coast of Japan, claiming thousands of lives, homes and towns.
A nuclear power station was famously among the collateral damage and, while he was safe in Perth, Jones knew that he too would be affected by the catastrophe.
''I thought this is just gonna be a disaster for us,'' he recalled.
With a partial meltdown in progress at the Fukushima power station, the uranium sector would soon be swamped by the killer tsunamis, and Impact's Botswana deal was swept away with it.
''It basically disappeared over that weekend,'' Jones said.
A year on, the Fukushima disaster continues to weigh heavily on the industry, but an increasing number of investors believe the time is right to wade back into the uranium sector.
* weigh heavily on ... ～に重くのしかかる、～に重荷になる
It's no secret that uranium stocks fell off a cliff following the Fukushima failure. More than $1.5 billion was wiped of the value of ASX-listed uranium plays on the first day of trading after the disaster.
Paladin Energy and ERA lost more than $1 billion of that and within six months both companies - aided by troubles in Europe and a few self-inflicted wounds - had shrunk to barely 20 per cent of their former selves.
The spot price for uranium fell sharply, and a round of impairment charges swept through the industry.
* impairment 損傷を与えること
But the impact was most profound at the junior end of the market, where the fallout from Fukushima changed companies.
In an unfortunate collision between marketing and timing, Renaissance Uranium listed just three months prior to Fukushima as a ''pure-play'' uranium stock. Within months those ambitions had changed, and managing director David Christensen now describes the company as a ''broad based minerals exploration company''.
Renaissance is not the only uranium play now scouring its tenements for traces of other minerals to help pay the bills until uranium recovers.
Prior to Fukushima, Thundelarra Exploration had been devoting about 75 per cent of its time and money to developing uranium assets, but these days it spends more time talking about copper and gold.
''We have scaled right back on uranium … the company will be spending 10 per cent or 15 per cent of its effort on uranium this year and the rest would be predominantly copper and gold,'' said Brett Lambert, who stood down as managing director of Thundelarra this week. ''From a technical perspective it's not the right thing to do but from a market reality it's the only way to go forward.''
The trend repeated through the many company presentations at last month's Paydirt uranium conference in Adelaide, prompting one industry veteran to quip that copper and gold had never before enjoyed so much airtime at a conference devoted to uranium.
Many analysts and funds managers believe the punishment handed out to the uranium sector after Fukushima was overly severe.'
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
'Black Students Face More Discipline, Data Suggests'
NYTの記事、'Black Students Face More Discipline, Data Suggests' (March 6, 2012) By TAMAR LEWINから。コメント欄では様々な意見が闘われています。
'Black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students, according to new data from the Department of Education.
Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. The data covered students from kindergarten age through high school.
* expulsion 退学処分
One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.
And in districts that reported expulsions under zero-tolerance policies, Hispanic and black students represent 45 percent of the student body, but 56 percent of those expelled under such policies.
* zero-tolerance いかなる違反も許さない
’《a ～》ゼロ・トレランス政策、ゼロ容認の方針［姿勢・政策］◆地区教育委員会が示した細かい生徒行動綱領に基づき、各学校は校則を整備し、父母らに通達する。自らの行動に責任がとれる年齢に達する生徒には、それに基づき責任を取らせる。これは罰の体験や反省を通して立ち直らせることを目的としている’ (引用元 アルク)
“Education is the civil rights of our generation,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in a telephone briefing with reporters on Monday. “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”
The department began gathering data on civil rights and education in 1968, but the project was suspended by the Bush administration in 2006. It has been reinstated and expanded to examine a broader range of information, including, for the first time, referrals to law enforcement, an area of increasing concern to civil rights advocates who see the emergence of a school-to-prison pipeline for a growing number of students of color.
According to the schools’ reports, over 70 percent of the students involved in school-related arrests or referred to law enforcement were Hispanic or black.
Black and Hispanic students — particularly those with disabilities — are also disproportionately subject to seclusion or restraints. Students with disabilities make up 12 percent of the student body, but 70 percent of those subject to physical restraints. Black students with disabilities constituted 21 percent of the total, but 44 percent of those with disabilities subject to mechanical restraints, like being strapped down. And while Hispanics made up 21 percent of the students without disabilities, they accounted for 42 percent of those without disabilities who were placed in seclusion.
“Those are extremely dramatic numbers, and show the importance of reinstating the civil rights data collection and expanding the categories of information collected,” said Deborah J. Vagins, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office. “The harsh punishments, especially expulsion under zero tolerance and referrals to law enforcement, show that students of color and students with disabilities are increasingly being pushed out of schools, oftentimes into the criminal justice system.”'
'Black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students, according to new data from the Department of Education.
Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. The data covered students from kindergarten age through high school.
* expulsion 退学処分
One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.
And in districts that reported expulsions under zero-tolerance policies, Hispanic and black students represent 45 percent of the student body, but 56 percent of those expelled under such policies.
* zero-tolerance いかなる違反も許さない
’《a ～》ゼロ・トレランス政策、ゼロ容認の方針［姿勢・政策］◆地区教育委員会が示した細かい生徒行動綱領に基づき、各学校は校則を整備し、父母らに通達する。自らの行動に責任がとれる年齢に達する生徒には、それに基づき責任を取らせる。これは罰の体験や反省を通して立ち直らせることを目的としている’ (引用元 アルク)
“Education is the civil rights of our generation,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in a telephone briefing with reporters on Monday. “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”
The department began gathering data on civil rights and education in 1968, but the project was suspended by the Bush administration in 2006. It has been reinstated and expanded to examine a broader range of information, including, for the first time, referrals to law enforcement, an area of increasing concern to civil rights advocates who see the emergence of a school-to-prison pipeline for a growing number of students of color.
According to the schools’ reports, over 70 percent of the students involved in school-related arrests or referred to law enforcement were Hispanic or black.
Black and Hispanic students — particularly those with disabilities — are also disproportionately subject to seclusion or restraints. Students with disabilities make up 12 percent of the student body, but 70 percent of those subject to physical restraints. Black students with disabilities constituted 21 percent of the total, but 44 percent of those with disabilities subject to mechanical restraints, like being strapped down. And while Hispanics made up 21 percent of the students without disabilities, they accounted for 42 percent of those without disabilities who were placed in seclusion.
“Those are extremely dramatic numbers, and show the importance of reinstating the civil rights data collection and expanding the categories of information collected,” said Deborah J. Vagins, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office. “The harsh punishments, especially expulsion under zero tolerance and referrals to law enforcement, show that students of color and students with disabilities are increasingly being pushed out of schools, oftentimes into the criminal justice system.”'
Friday, March 2, 2012
ニューヨーク在住アジア人の喫煙者
NYTの記事、'For Many Asian New Yorkers, Smoking Is Still a Way of Life' By SARAH MASLIN NIR (March 1, 2012)から。
On a cool, damp afternoon in Flushing, Queens, Seung Jun stood outside on Main Street on Thursday, a smoker among his peers. He unsheathed a Parliament and took a long drag, as though he were taking in a breath of relief.
* unsheath （タバコの箱からタバコを）抜く
All around him, other Asian men engaged in the same ritual, on the sidewalks, in doorways and on bicycles. Here, in the heart of the city’s largest Asian community, smoking is still a way of life.
The city’s Asian population has been stubbornly resistant to the otherwise successful efforts by the Bloomberg administration to curb smoking among New Yorkers. Smoking rates among the city’s Asian communities have not budged since 2002 — most notably among Asian men, despite decreases in the habit among almost every other demographic, according to data from the city’s health department.
* curb ... 抑制する、～に歯止めをかける
On Thursday, the department stepped up its appeals to Asian smokers, introducing graphic ads in Chinese for its annual campaign to distribute nicotine patches and gum, and offering Chinese speakers for those who call 311 to enroll in the program. The department will also seed the ethnic news media with translated versions of its antismoking campaign called “Pain,” which depicts excruciating smoking-related cancers.
* excruciating ひどく苦しめるような
“We looked at our data very carefully to understand who is still smoking in New York City,” said Jenna Mandel-Ricci, a deputy director at the Bureau of Chronic Disease Prevention and Tobacco Control. She added that the city’s Russian community, about a quarter of whom smoke, would be given the same kind of attention.
Part of the problem is rooted in homeland: Nearly 70 percent of men in both China and South Korea smoke, for example, according to the World Health Organization (for women in both countries the number is below 10 percent). In New York City, the numbers are far lower: about 17 percent of Asian men smoke, and under 5 percent of women, according to the health department.
But unlike most other demographic groups in the city, Asian men smoke at a rate that did not show a statistically significant drop from 2002 to 2010. Among blacks, for example, the rate fell to 12.5 percent from 20.8 percent. And among whites, it dropped to 15.6 percent from 23.8 percent.
Among Asians, there are “persistent cultural norms around smoking that the city’s policies and programs have not really penetrated,” said Dr. Donna Shelley, an associate professor at the New York University School of Medicine, who has studied smoking in the city’s Asian communities. For example, gifts of cigarettes at a holiday gathering, where other groups might give, say, a bottle of Malbec, are routine, Dr. Shelley found.
“It’s a largely accepted part of our culture,” says Grace Meng, a Queens assemblywoman who is Chinese-American and represents Flushing. She says she is shocked when people think nothing of lighting up over a business dinner.
While the trend is citywide, Flushing, with one of the highest concentrations of Asians in the five boroughs, seems to encapsulate the different dimensions of the problem.
On Thursday, Chinh Vu, 60, who moved here from Vietnam three decades ago, was feeding his pack-a-day habit with a fresh Dunhill cigarette outside of CJ Food Market on Main Street. All his peers smoke, he said, but not his children and grandchildren. “Over here they don’t smoke, they go to school, they learn something and they don’t smoke,” he said. “Good for them. It’s not good for me, but I can’t stop.”
The problem is less prevalent among Asian women. In most Asian countries, less than 10 percent of women smoke, and even fewer smoke in New York. However, some researchers say that smoking among young Asian-American girls seems to be rising, as they seek to keep up with their peer group, who often view smoking as hip.
On a cool, damp afternoon in Flushing, Queens, Seung Jun stood outside on Main Street on Thursday, a smoker among his peers. He unsheathed a Parliament and took a long drag, as though he were taking in a breath of relief.
* unsheath （タバコの箱からタバコを）抜く
All around him, other Asian men engaged in the same ritual, on the sidewalks, in doorways and on bicycles. Here, in the heart of the city’s largest Asian community, smoking is still a way of life.
The city’s Asian population has been stubbornly resistant to the otherwise successful efforts by the Bloomberg administration to curb smoking among New Yorkers. Smoking rates among the city’s Asian communities have not budged since 2002 — most notably among Asian men, despite decreases in the habit among almost every other demographic, according to data from the city’s health department.
* curb ... 抑制する、～に歯止めをかける
On Thursday, the department stepped up its appeals to Asian smokers, introducing graphic ads in Chinese for its annual campaign to distribute nicotine patches and gum, and offering Chinese speakers for those who call 311 to enroll in the program. The department will also seed the ethnic news media with translated versions of its antismoking campaign called “Pain,” which depicts excruciating smoking-related cancers.
* excruciating ひどく苦しめるような
“We looked at our data very carefully to understand who is still smoking in New York City,” said Jenna Mandel-Ricci, a deputy director at the Bureau of Chronic Disease Prevention and Tobacco Control. She added that the city’s Russian community, about a quarter of whom smoke, would be given the same kind of attention.
Part of the problem is rooted in homeland: Nearly 70 percent of men in both China and South Korea smoke, for example, according to the World Health Organization (for women in both countries the number is below 10 percent). In New York City, the numbers are far lower: about 17 percent of Asian men smoke, and under 5 percent of women, according to the health department.
But unlike most other demographic groups in the city, Asian men smoke at a rate that did not show a statistically significant drop from 2002 to 2010. Among blacks, for example, the rate fell to 12.5 percent from 20.8 percent. And among whites, it dropped to 15.6 percent from 23.8 percent.
Among Asians, there are “persistent cultural norms around smoking that the city’s policies and programs have not really penetrated,” said Dr. Donna Shelley, an associate professor at the New York University School of Medicine, who has studied smoking in the city’s Asian communities. For example, gifts of cigarettes at a holiday gathering, where other groups might give, say, a bottle of Malbec, are routine, Dr. Shelley found.
“It’s a largely accepted part of our culture,” says Grace Meng, a Queens assemblywoman who is Chinese-American and represents Flushing. She says she is shocked when people think nothing of lighting up over a business dinner.
While the trend is citywide, Flushing, with one of the highest concentrations of Asians in the five boroughs, seems to encapsulate the different dimensions of the problem.
On Thursday, Chinh Vu, 60, who moved here from Vietnam three decades ago, was feeding his pack-a-day habit with a fresh Dunhill cigarette outside of CJ Food Market on Main Street. All his peers smoke, he said, but not his children and grandchildren. “Over here they don’t smoke, they go to school, they learn something and they don’t smoke,” he said. “Good for them. It’s not good for me, but I can’t stop.”
The problem is less prevalent among Asian women. In most Asian countries, less than 10 percent of women smoke, and even fewer smoke in New York. However, some researchers say that smoking among young Asian-American girls seems to be rising, as they seek to keep up with their peer group, who often view smoking as hip.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
やっぱり
NYTの記事、'Japan Weighed Evacuating Tokyo in Nuclear Crisis' By MARTIN FACKLER (February 27, 2012)から。
'TOKYO — In the darkest moments of last year’s nuclear accident, Japanese leaders did not know the actual extent of damage at the plant and secretly considered the possibility of evacuating Tokyo, even as they tried to play down the risks in public, an independent investigation into the accident disclosed on Monday.
The investigation by the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, a new private policy organization, offers one of the most vivid accounts yet of how Japan teetered on the edge of an even larger nuclear crisis than the one that engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. A team of 30 university professors, lawyers and journalists spent more than six months on the inquiry into Japan’s response to the triple meltdown at the plant, which followed a powerful earthquake and tsunami on March 11 that shut down the plant’s cooling systems.
* teeter 〔悪い方に向かう〕瀬戸際にある、危うい立場にいる
The team interviewed more than 300 people, including top nuclear regulators and government officials, as well as the prime minister during the crisis, Naoto Kan. They were granted extraordinary access, in part because of a strong public demand for greater accountability and because the organization’s founder, Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor in chief of the daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun, is one of Japan’s most respected public intellectuals.
An advance copy of the report describes how Japan’s response was hindered at times by a debilitating breakdown in trust between the major actors: Mr. Kan; the Tokyo headquarters of the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, known as Tepco; and the manager at the stricken plant. The conflicts produced confused flows of sometimes contradictory information in the early days of the crisis, the report said.
* debilitating 弱らせる、衰弱させる
It describes frantic phone calls by the manager, Masao Yoshida, to top officials in the Kan government arguing that he could get the plant under control if he could keep his staff in place, while at the same time ignoring orders from Tepco’s headquarters not to use sea water to cool the overheating reactors. By contrast, Mr. Funabashi said in an interview, Tepco’s president, Masataka Shimizu, was making competing calls to the prime minister’s office saying that the company should evacuate all of its staff, a step that could have been catastrophic.
The 400-page report, due to be released later this week, also describes a darkening mood at the prime minister’s residence as a series of hydrogen explosions rocked the plant on March 14 and 15. It says Mr. Kan and other officials began discussing a worst-case outcome if workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were evacuated. This would have allowed the plant to spiral out of control, releasing even larger amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere that would in turn force the evacuation of other nearby nuclear plants, causing further meltdowns.
* spiral out of control 手に負えない状況に陥る
The report quotes the chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yukio Edano, as having warned that such a “demonic chain reaction” of plant meltdowns could result in the evacuation of Tokyo, 150 miles to the south.
“We would lose Fukushima Daini, then we would lose Tokai,” Mr. Edano is quoted as saying, naming two other nuclear plants. “If that happened, it was only logical to conclude that we would also lose Tokyo itself.”
The report also describes the panic within the Kan administration at the prospect of large radiation releases from the more than 10,000 spent fuel rods that were stored in relatively unprotected pools near the damaged reactors. The report says it was not until five days after the earthquake that a Japanese military helicopter was finally able to confirm that the pool deemed at highest risk, near the No. 4 reactor, was still safely filled with water.
“We barely avoided the worst-case scenario, though the public didn’t know it at the time,” Mr. Funabashi, the foundation founder, said.
Mr. Funabashi blamed the Kan administration’s fear of setting off a panic for its decision to understate the true dangers of the accident. He said the Japanese government hid its most alarming assessments not just from its own public but also from allies like the United States. Mr. Funabashi said the investigation revealed “how precarious the U.S.-Japan relationship was” in the early days of the crisis, until the two nations began daily informational meetings at the prime minister’s residence on March 22.
The report seems to confirm the suspicions of nuclear experts in the United States — inside and outside the government — that the Japanese government was not being forthcoming about the full dangers posed by the stricken Fukushima plant. But it also shows that the United States government occasionally overreacted and inflated the risks, such as when American officials mistakenly warned that the spent fuel rods in the pool near unit No. 4 were exposed to the air and vulnerable to melting down and releasing huge amounts of radiation.
* being forthcoming about 《be ～》～について公表される
Still, Mr. Funabashi said, it was the Japanese government’s failure to warn its people of the dangers and the widespread distrust it bred in the government that spurred him to undertake an independent investigation. Such outside investigations have been rare in Japan, where the public has tended to accept official versions of events.
He said his group’s findings conflicted with those of the government’s own investigation into the accident, which were released in an interim report in December. A big difference involved one of the most crucial moments of the nuclear crisis, when the prime minister, Mr. Kan, marched into Tepco’s headquarters early on the morning of March 15 upon hearing that the company wanted to withdraw its employees from the wrecked nuclear plant.
'TOKYO — In the darkest moments of last year’s nuclear accident, Japanese leaders did not know the actual extent of damage at the plant and secretly considered the possibility of evacuating Tokyo, even as they tried to play down the risks in public, an independent investigation into the accident disclosed on Monday.
The investigation by the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, a new private policy organization, offers one of the most vivid accounts yet of how Japan teetered on the edge of an even larger nuclear crisis than the one that engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. A team of 30 university professors, lawyers and journalists spent more than six months on the inquiry into Japan’s response to the triple meltdown at the plant, which followed a powerful earthquake and tsunami on March 11 that shut down the plant’s cooling systems.
* teeter 〔悪い方に向かう〕瀬戸際にある、危うい立場にいる
The team interviewed more than 300 people, including top nuclear regulators and government officials, as well as the prime minister during the crisis, Naoto Kan. They were granted extraordinary access, in part because of a strong public demand for greater accountability and because the organization’s founder, Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor in chief of the daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun, is one of Japan’s most respected public intellectuals.
An advance copy of the report describes how Japan’s response was hindered at times by a debilitating breakdown in trust between the major actors: Mr. Kan; the Tokyo headquarters of the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, known as Tepco; and the manager at the stricken plant. The conflicts produced confused flows of sometimes contradictory information in the early days of the crisis, the report said.
* debilitating 弱らせる、衰弱させる
It describes frantic phone calls by the manager, Masao Yoshida, to top officials in the Kan government arguing that he could get the plant under control if he could keep his staff in place, while at the same time ignoring orders from Tepco’s headquarters not to use sea water to cool the overheating reactors. By contrast, Mr. Funabashi said in an interview, Tepco’s president, Masataka Shimizu, was making competing calls to the prime minister’s office saying that the company should evacuate all of its staff, a step that could have been catastrophic.
The 400-page report, due to be released later this week, also describes a darkening mood at the prime minister’s residence as a series of hydrogen explosions rocked the plant on March 14 and 15. It says Mr. Kan and other officials began discussing a worst-case outcome if workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were evacuated. This would have allowed the plant to spiral out of control, releasing even larger amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere that would in turn force the evacuation of other nearby nuclear plants, causing further meltdowns.
* spiral out of control 手に負えない状況に陥る
The report quotes the chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yukio Edano, as having warned that such a “demonic chain reaction” of plant meltdowns could result in the evacuation of Tokyo, 150 miles to the south.
“We would lose Fukushima Daini, then we would lose Tokai,” Mr. Edano is quoted as saying, naming two other nuclear plants. “If that happened, it was only logical to conclude that we would also lose Tokyo itself.”
The report also describes the panic within the Kan administration at the prospect of large radiation releases from the more than 10,000 spent fuel rods that were stored in relatively unprotected pools near the damaged reactors. The report says it was not until five days after the earthquake that a Japanese military helicopter was finally able to confirm that the pool deemed at highest risk, near the No. 4 reactor, was still safely filled with water.
“We barely avoided the worst-case scenario, though the public didn’t know it at the time,” Mr. Funabashi, the foundation founder, said.
Mr. Funabashi blamed the Kan administration’s fear of setting off a panic for its decision to understate the true dangers of the accident. He said the Japanese government hid its most alarming assessments not just from its own public but also from allies like the United States. Mr. Funabashi said the investigation revealed “how precarious the U.S.-Japan relationship was” in the early days of the crisis, until the two nations began daily informational meetings at the prime minister’s residence on March 22.
The report seems to confirm the suspicions of nuclear experts in the United States — inside and outside the government — that the Japanese government was not being forthcoming about the full dangers posed by the stricken Fukushima plant. But it also shows that the United States government occasionally overreacted and inflated the risks, such as when American officials mistakenly warned that the spent fuel rods in the pool near unit No. 4 were exposed to the air and vulnerable to melting down and releasing huge amounts of radiation.
* being forthcoming about 《be ～》～について公表される
Still, Mr. Funabashi said, it was the Japanese government’s failure to warn its people of the dangers and the widespread distrust it bred in the government that spurred him to undertake an independent investigation. Such outside investigations have been rare in Japan, where the public has tended to accept official versions of events.
He said his group’s findings conflicted with those of the government’s own investigation into the accident, which were released in an interim report in December. A big difference involved one of the most crucial moments of the nuclear crisis, when the prime minister, Mr. Kan, marched into Tepco’s headquarters early on the morning of March 15 upon hearing that the company wanted to withdraw its employees from the wrecked nuclear plant.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
幸せ度と経済の関係
The Economistの記事、'Measures of well-being Chilled out:A poll contradicts what we thought we knew about income and happiness'(Feb 25th 2012) から。
'DESPITE global economic gloom, the world is a happier place than it was before the financial crisis began. That is the counterintuitive conclusion of a poll of 19,000 adults in 24 countries by Ipsos, a research company. Some 77% of respondents now describe themselves as happy, up three points on 2007, the last year before the crisis. Fully 22% (up from 20%) describe themselves as very happy—a more important measure, says Ipsos’s John Wright, since whenever three-quarters of people agree on anything, “you need to pay attention to intensity in the results.”
All such polls come with a health warning. The level of happiness is self-reported—and the term means different things to different people. The Ipsos poll, measuring degrees of happiness, is not strictly comparable with those that ask about “well-being” (such as Gallup) or “life satisfaction” (the World Values survey), so it is hard to test the validity of the conclusions against other efforts. The margin of error is wide, at plus or minus 3.1 points for most countries. Still, Ipsos has been doing its survey regularly for five years and the figures have proved fairly stable during that time, not wildly volatile which they would have been if they had been flaky.
* flaky 当てにならない
Two conclusions emerge. Large, fast-growing emerging markets do not share rich industrialised countries’ pessimism. The already large “very happy” cohort rose 16 points in Turkey, ten points in Mexico and five points in India. Even rich-country pessimism is uneven. The share of “very happy” people rose six points in—of all places—Japan, defying tsunami and nuclear accidents. But growth amid global misery does not explain everything: the biggest falls in happiness also occurred in large emerging markets, in Indonesia, Brazil and—a perennial miseryguts—Russia.
* perennial 何度も繰り返される
* miseryguts 不平［文句］ばかり言っている人
The second conclusion challenges the received notions of mankind’s moods. A tenet of political science is that happiness levels rise with wealth and then plateau, usually when a country’s national income per head reaches around $25,000 a year. “The richer a country gets,” argued Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in “The Spirit Level”, an influential book of 2009, “the less getting still richer adds to the population’s happiness.” Many on the left have concluded that pursuing further economic growth is pointless. Even right-wing politicians such as Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, have set up projects to study “gross national happiness”.
* tenet 〔宗教や政治の基本的な〕教義、信条
But the Ipsos study shows the highest levels of self-reported happiness not in rich countries, as one would expect, but in poor and middle-income ones, notably Indonesia, India and Mexico. In rich countries, happiness scores range from above-average—28% of Australians and Americans say they are very happy—to far below the mean. The figures for Italy and Spain were 13% and 11% (Greece was not in the sample). Most Europeans are gloomier than the world average. So levels of income are, if anything, inversely related to felicity. Perceived happiness depends on a lot more than material welfare.
'DESPITE global economic gloom, the world is a happier place than it was before the financial crisis began. That is the counterintuitive conclusion of a poll of 19,000 adults in 24 countries by Ipsos, a research company. Some 77% of respondents now describe themselves as happy, up three points on 2007, the last year before the crisis. Fully 22% (up from 20%) describe themselves as very happy—a more important measure, says Ipsos’s John Wright, since whenever three-quarters of people agree on anything, “you need to pay attention to intensity in the results.”
All such polls come with a health warning. The level of happiness is self-reported—and the term means different things to different people. The Ipsos poll, measuring degrees of happiness, is not strictly comparable with those that ask about “well-being” (such as Gallup) or “life satisfaction” (the World Values survey), so it is hard to test the validity of the conclusions against other efforts. The margin of error is wide, at plus or minus 3.1 points for most countries. Still, Ipsos has been doing its survey regularly for five years and the figures have proved fairly stable during that time, not wildly volatile which they would have been if they had been flaky.
* flaky 当てにならない
Two conclusions emerge. Large, fast-growing emerging markets do not share rich industrialised countries’ pessimism. The already large “very happy” cohort rose 16 points in Turkey, ten points in Mexico and five points in India. Even rich-country pessimism is uneven. The share of “very happy” people rose six points in—of all places—Japan, defying tsunami and nuclear accidents. But growth amid global misery does not explain everything: the biggest falls in happiness also occurred in large emerging markets, in Indonesia, Brazil and—a perennial miseryguts—Russia.
* perennial 何度も繰り返される
* miseryguts 不平［文句］ばかり言っている人
The second conclusion challenges the received notions of mankind’s moods. A tenet of political science is that happiness levels rise with wealth and then plateau, usually when a country’s national income per head reaches around $25,000 a year. “The richer a country gets,” argued Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in “The Spirit Level”, an influential book of 2009, “the less getting still richer adds to the population’s happiness.” Many on the left have concluded that pursuing further economic growth is pointless. Even right-wing politicians such as Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, have set up projects to study “gross national happiness”.
* tenet 〔宗教や政治の基本的な〕教義、信条
But the Ipsos study shows the highest levels of self-reported happiness not in rich countries, as one would expect, but in poor and middle-income ones, notably Indonesia, India and Mexico. In rich countries, happiness scores range from above-average—28% of Australians and Americans say they are very happy—to far below the mean. The figures for Italy and Spain were 13% and 11% (Greece was not in the sample). Most Europeans are gloomier than the world average. So levels of income are, if anything, inversely related to felicity. Perceived happiness depends on a lot more than material welfare.
'European Crisis Realities'
NYTの記事、’European Crisis Realities’ by Paul Krugman（February 25, 2012）から。
’This is not original, but for reference I find some ＊charts useful. In what follows I show data for the euro area minus Malta and Cyprus — 15 countries. I use red bars for the GIPSIs — Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Ireland — and blue bars for everyone else.
＊チャートは実際の記事で見られます。
There are basically three stories about the euro crisis in wide circulation: the Republican story, the German story, and the truth.
The Republican story is that it’s all about excessive welfare states. How does that hold up? Well, let’s look at public social expenditures as a share of GDP in 2007, before the crisis, from the OECD Factbook:
Hmm, only Italy is in the top five — and Germany’s welfare state was bigger.
OK, the German story is that it’s about fiscal profligacy, running excessive deficits. From the IMF WEO database, here’s the average budget deficit between 1999 (the beginning of the euro) and 2007:
＊ fiscal profligacy 財政浪費
Greece is there, and Italy (although its deficits were not very big, and the ratio of debt to GDP fell over the period). But Portugal doesn’t stand out, and Spain and Ireland were models of virtue.
Finally, let’s look at the balance of payments — the current account deficit, which is the flip side of capital inflows (also from the IMF):
＊ inflows 流入額
We’re doing a lot better here — especially when you bear in mind that Estonia, a recent entrant to the euro, had an 18 percent decline in real GDP between 2007 and 2009. (See Edward Hugh on why you shouldn’t make too much of the bounceback.)
＊ entrant 新加入者
What we’re basically looking at, then, is a balance of payments problem, in which capital flooded south after the creation of the euro, leading to overvaluation in southern Europe. It’s not a perfect fit — Italy managed to have relatively high inflation without large trade deficits. But it’s the main way you should think about where we are.
And the key point is that the two false diagnoses lead to policies that don’t address the real problem. You can slash the welfare state all you want (and the right wants to slash it down to bathtub-drowning size), but this has very little to do with export competitiveness. You can pursue crippling fiscal austerity, but this improves the external balance only by driving down the economy and hence import demand, with maybe, maybe, a gradual “internal devaluation” caused by high unemployment.
＊ slash 削減する
Now, if you’re running a peripheral nation, and the troika demands austerity, you have no choice except the nuclear option of leaving the euro, coming soon to a Balkan nation near you. But non-GIPSI European leaders should realize that what the GIPSIs really need is a general European reflation. So let’s hope that they get this, and also give each of us a pony.
＊ reflation 通貨再膨張
’This is not original, but for reference I find some ＊charts useful. In what follows I show data for the euro area minus Malta and Cyprus — 15 countries. I use red bars for the GIPSIs — Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Ireland — and blue bars for everyone else.
＊チャートは実際の記事で見られます。
There are basically three stories about the euro crisis in wide circulation: the Republican story, the German story, and the truth.
The Republican story is that it’s all about excessive welfare states. How does that hold up? Well, let’s look at public social expenditures as a share of GDP in 2007, before the crisis, from the OECD Factbook:
Hmm, only Italy is in the top five — and Germany’s welfare state was bigger.
OK, the German story is that it’s about fiscal profligacy, running excessive deficits. From the IMF WEO database, here’s the average budget deficit between 1999 (the beginning of the euro) and 2007:
＊ fiscal profligacy 財政浪費
Greece is there, and Italy (although its deficits were not very big, and the ratio of debt to GDP fell over the period). But Portugal doesn’t stand out, and Spain and Ireland were models of virtue.
Finally, let’s look at the balance of payments — the current account deficit, which is the flip side of capital inflows (also from the IMF):
＊ inflows 流入額
We’re doing a lot better here — especially when you bear in mind that Estonia, a recent entrant to the euro, had an 18 percent decline in real GDP between 2007 and 2009. (See Edward Hugh on why you shouldn’t make too much of the bounceback.)
＊ entrant 新加入者
What we’re basically looking at, then, is a balance of payments problem, in which capital flooded south after the creation of the euro, leading to overvaluation in southern Europe. It’s not a perfect fit — Italy managed to have relatively high inflation without large trade deficits. But it’s the main way you should think about where we are.
And the key point is that the two false diagnoses lead to policies that don’t address the real problem. You can slash the welfare state all you want (and the right wants to slash it down to bathtub-drowning size), but this has very little to do with export competitiveness. You can pursue crippling fiscal austerity, but this improves the external balance only by driving down the economy and hence import demand, with maybe, maybe, a gradual “internal devaluation” caused by high unemployment.
＊ slash 削減する
Now, if you’re running a peripheral nation, and the troika demands austerity, you have no choice except the nuclear option of leaving the euro, coming soon to a Balkan nation near you. But non-GIPSI European leaders should realize that what the GIPSIs really need is a general European reflation. So let’s hope that they get this, and also give each of us a pony.
＊ reflation 通貨再膨張
Saturday, February 25, 2012
大学って何のためにあるの？
The guardianの記事、'The threat to our universities' by Stefan Collini (Friday 24 February 2012 22.56 GMT)から。
'What are universities for? Should they be businesses 'competing on price'? Are students 'consumers', concerned only with getting jobs? A half-baked market ideology informs official thinking about higher education, and it undermines an ideal that a vast number of people cherish.
Take one job centre. Add several apprenticeship programmes. Combine with an industrial lab (fold in a medical research centre for extra flavour). Throw in some subsidised gigs and a large dollop of cheap beer. Don't stir too much. Decorate with a forward-looking logo. And hey presto! – you've got a university.
At this point, I should be able to say (according to the formula): "Here's one I made earlier." In reality, of course, no one has ever successfully created a university by following this recipe. But if you simply go by what is now said about universities in official pronouncements from government departments or funding agencies or employers' associations, you could be forgiven for thinking that this recipe pretty much describes what these institutions are all about.
*pronouncements 公式見解
In recent years, universities have been in the news as perhaps never before, but increasingly in public discourse in Britain, they are said to serve two purposes – and two purposes only. The first is to "equip" "young people" to get jobs in "the fast-moving economy of tomorrow". The other is to contribute to "growth", to develop the "cutting-edge products" needed in "today's competitive global marketplace" (and preferably to discover the odd miracle drug, too).
I realise that by merely raising a quizzical eyebrow about the self-evident priority of these goals I am going to be damned for being out of touch with "the real world". What's even more curious is that everyone who expresses the slightest reservation about this vocabulary turns out to live at the same address. Simply to suggest that universities might have other purposes is immediately to be classed as someone who "lives in the ivory tower".
* quizzical いぶかしげな
'What are universities for? Should they be businesses 'competing on price'? Are students 'consumers', concerned only with getting jobs? A half-baked market ideology informs official thinking about higher education, and it undermines an ideal that a vast number of people cherish.
Take one job centre. Add several apprenticeship programmes. Combine with an industrial lab (fold in a medical research centre for extra flavour). Throw in some subsidised gigs and a large dollop of cheap beer. Don't stir too much. Decorate with a forward-looking logo. And hey presto! – you've got a university.
At this point, I should be able to say (according to the formula): "Here's one I made earlier." In reality, of course, no one has ever successfully created a university by following this recipe. But if you simply go by what is now said about universities in official pronouncements from government departments or funding agencies or employers' associations, you could be forgiven for thinking that this recipe pretty much describes what these institutions are all about.
*pronouncements 公式見解
In recent years, universities have been in the news as perhaps never before, but increasingly in public discourse in Britain, they are said to serve two purposes – and two purposes only. The first is to "equip" "young people" to get jobs in "the fast-moving economy of tomorrow". The other is to contribute to "growth", to develop the "cutting-edge products" needed in "today's competitive global marketplace" (and preferably to discover the odd miracle drug, too).
I realise that by merely raising a quizzical eyebrow about the self-evident priority of these goals I am going to be damned for being out of touch with "the real world". What's even more curious is that everyone who expresses the slightest reservation about this vocabulary turns out to live at the same address. Simply to suggest that universities might have other purposes is immediately to be classed as someone who "lives in the ivory tower".
* quizzical いぶかしげな
OnLive Desktop Plus
NYTの記事、'Windows on the iPad, and Speedy' By DAVID POGUE(February 22, 2012)から。
'You’re probably paying something like $60 a month for high-speed Internet. I’m paying $5 a month, and my connection is 1,000 times faster.
Your iPad can’t play Flash videos on the Web. Mine can.
Your copy of Windows needs constant updating and patching and protection against viruses and spyware. Mine is always clean and always up-to-date.
No, I’m not some kind of smug techno-elitist; you can have all of that, too. All you have to do is sign up for a radical iPad service called OnLive Desktop Plus.
It’s a tiny app — about 5 megabytes. When you open it, you see a standard Windows 7 desktop, right there on your iPad. The full, latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader are set up and ready to use — no installation, no serial numbers, no pop-up balloons nagging you to update this or that. It may be the least annoying version of Windows you’ve ever used.
That’s pretty impressive — but not as impressive as what’s going on behind the scenes. The PC that’s driving your iPad Windows experience is, in fact, a “farm” of computers at one of three data centers thousands of miles away. Every time you tap the screen, scroll a list or type on the on-screen keyboard, you’re sending signals to those distant computers. The screen image is blasted back to your iPad with astonishingly little lag.
There’s an insane amount of technology behind this stunt — 10 years in the making, according to the company’s founder. (He’s a veteran of Apple’s original QuickTime team and Microsoft’s WebTV and Xbox teams.) OnLive Desktop builds on the company’s original business, a service that lets gamers play high-horsepower video games on Macs or
low-powered Windows computers like netbooks.
* stunt 離れ業、妙技
The free version of the OnLive Desktop service arrived in January. It gives you Word, Excel and PowerPoint, a few basic Windows apps (like Paint, Media Player, Notepad and Calculator), and 2 gigabytes of storage.
Plenty of apps give you stripped-down versions of Office on the iPad. But OnLive Desktop gives you the complete Windows Office suite. In Word, you can do fancy stuff like tracking changes and high-end typography. In PowerPoint, you can make slide shows that the iPad projects with all of the cross fades, zooms and animations intact.
* stripped-down 必要最低限のものだけを装備した
Thanks to Microsoft’s own Touch Pack add-on, all of this works with touch-screen gestures. You can pinch and spread two fingers to zoom in and out of your Office documents. You can use Windows’ impressive handwriting recognition to enter text (although a Bluetooth keyboard works better). You can flick to scroll through a list.
Instead of clicking the mouse on things, you can simply tap, although a stylus works better than a fingertip; many of the Windows controls are too tiny for a finger to tap precisely. (On a real Windows PC, you could open the Control Panel to enlarge the controls for touch use — but OnLive’s simulated PC is lacking the Control Panel, which is one of its few downsides.)
* stylus タッチペン
OnLive Desktop is seamless and fairly amazing. And fast; on what other PC does Word open in one second?
But the only way to get files onto and off OnLive Desktop is using a Documents folder on the desktop. To access it, you have to visit OnLive’s Web site on your actual PC.'
'You’re probably paying something like $60 a month for high-speed Internet. I’m paying $5 a month, and my connection is 1,000 times faster.
Your iPad can’t play Flash videos on the Web. Mine can.
Your copy of Windows needs constant updating and patching and protection against viruses and spyware. Mine is always clean and always up-to-date.
No, I’m not some kind of smug techno-elitist; you can have all of that, too. All you have to do is sign up for a radical iPad service called OnLive Desktop Plus.
It’s a tiny app — about 5 megabytes. When you open it, you see a standard Windows 7 desktop, right there on your iPad. The full, latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader are set up and ready to use — no installation, no serial numbers, no pop-up balloons nagging you to update this or that. It may be the least annoying version of Windows you’ve ever used.
That’s pretty impressive — but not as impressive as what’s going on behind the scenes. The PC that’s driving your iPad Windows experience is, in fact, a “farm” of computers at one of three data centers thousands of miles away. Every time you tap the screen, scroll a list or type on the on-screen keyboard, you’re sending signals to those distant computers. The screen image is blasted back to your iPad with astonishingly little lag.
There’s an insane amount of technology behind this stunt — 10 years in the making, according to the company’s founder. (He’s a veteran of Apple’s original QuickTime team and Microsoft’s WebTV and Xbox teams.) OnLive Desktop builds on the company’s original business, a service that lets gamers play high-horsepower video games on Macs or
low-powered Windows computers like netbooks.
* stunt 離れ業、妙技
The free version of the OnLive Desktop service arrived in January. It gives you Word, Excel and PowerPoint, a few basic Windows apps (like Paint, Media Player, Notepad and Calculator), and 2 gigabytes of storage.
Plenty of apps give you stripped-down versions of Office on the iPad. But OnLive Desktop gives you the complete Windows Office suite. In Word, you can do fancy stuff like tracking changes and high-end typography. In PowerPoint, you can make slide shows that the iPad projects with all of the cross fades, zooms and animations intact.
* stripped-down 必要最低限のものだけを装備した
Thanks to Microsoft’s own Touch Pack add-on, all of this works with touch-screen gestures. You can pinch and spread two fingers to zoom in and out of your Office documents. You can use Windows’ impressive handwriting recognition to enter text (although a Bluetooth keyboard works better). You can flick to scroll through a list.
Instead of clicking the mouse on things, you can simply tap, although a stylus works better than a fingertip; many of the Windows controls are too tiny for a finger to tap precisely. (On a real Windows PC, you could open the Control Panel to enlarge the controls for touch use — but OnLive’s simulated PC is lacking the Control Panel, which is one of its few downsides.)
* stylus タッチペン
OnLive Desktop is seamless and fairly amazing. And fast; on what other PC does Word open in one second?
But the only way to get files onto and off OnLive Desktop is using a Documents folder on the desktop. To access it, you have to visit OnLive’s Web site on your actual PC.'
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
ラッド再び
オーストラリア政変、ラッド前首相が再び大変なことになっていますが、The Ageの記事、'And the jostling for numbers begins in Labor leadership battle'by Jessica Wright and Judith Ireland (February 23, 2012)から。
'The numbers battle for the Labor leadership has begun in earnest with the former attorney-general Robert McClelland breaking ranks to declare his support for Kevin Rudd.
* begin in earnest 本格化する、熱が入る
* break ranks〔同一組織内のメンバーに〕反対する、逆らう
Earlier this afternooon resources minister Martin Ferguson became the first cabinet minister to throw his weight behind Mr Rudd in a day where one after the other of his colleagues have lined up to trash the former foreign minister.
* throw one's weight behind ... 自分の地位を利用してまで～を支援する
* trash ... ～を激しく非難する
Mr Rudd's campaign has also been bolstered by Kim Carr - another former cabinet minister and Left faction heavyweight - and the outspoken Victorian Senator Doug Cameron.
* bolster 支援する
Mr McClelland, who was demoted to emergency services minister last year in a cabinet reshuffle, told The Pulse: "I'll be supporting Kevin again on the basis that he's our best prospect to win the next federal election. Kevin is the only Labor leader to win in his own right in 17 years.
* demote 〔人や物を〕降格させる
"In circumstances where the party's primary vote has been flatlining for 12 months, we have an obligation to put forward our best leader to the voters."
* flatline〔上下変動せずに〕水平になる
It comes as it was revealed that Mr Rudd sought to contact the Greens Leader, Bob Brown and key independent MPs immediately after his shock resignation in Washington DC late last night.
Advertisement: Story continues below
Mr Ferguson said he believed Mr Rudd was the best candidate to take on Opposition Leader Tony Abbott at the next federal election.
The announcement is the latest in a swinging pendulum of senior MPs to declare their support for Ms Gillard or Mr Rudd although the Prime Minister has claimed the lion's share of public caucus support to date.'
'The numbers battle for the Labor leadership has begun in earnest with the former attorney-general Robert McClelland breaking ranks to declare his support for Kevin Rudd.
* begin in earnest 本格化する、熱が入る
* break ranks〔同一組織内のメンバーに〕反対する、逆らう
Earlier this afternooon resources minister Martin Ferguson became the first cabinet minister to throw his weight behind Mr Rudd in a day where one after the other of his colleagues have lined up to trash the former foreign minister.
* throw one's weight behind ... 自分の地位を利用してまで～を支援する
* trash ... ～を激しく非難する
Mr Rudd's campaign has also been bolstered by Kim Carr - another former cabinet minister and Left faction heavyweight - and the outspoken Victorian Senator Doug Cameron.
* bolster 支援する
Mr McClelland, who was demoted to emergency services minister last year in a cabinet reshuffle, told The Pulse: "I'll be supporting Kevin again on the basis that he's our best prospect to win the next federal election. Kevin is the only Labor leader to win in his own right in 17 years.
* demote 〔人や物を〕降格させる
"In circumstances where the party's primary vote has been flatlining for 12 months, we have an obligation to put forward our best leader to the voters."
* flatline〔上下変動せずに〕水平になる
It comes as it was revealed that Mr Rudd sought to contact the Greens Leader, Bob Brown and key independent MPs immediately after his shock resignation in Washington DC late last night.
Advertisement: Story continues below
Mr Ferguson said he believed Mr Rudd was the best candidate to take on Opposition Leader Tony Abbott at the next federal election.
The announcement is the latest in a swinging pendulum of senior MPs to declare their support for Ms Gillard or Mr Rudd although the Prime Minister has claimed the lion's share of public caucus support to date.'
Sunday, February 19, 2012
借金地獄
Reutersの記事、'Insight: Japan slowly wakes up to doomsday debt risk' By Tetsushi Kajimoto, Leika Kihara and Tomasz Janowski (Fri Feb 17, 2012 5:36am EST)から。
'(Reuters) - Capital flight, soaring borrowing costs, tanking currency and stocks and a central bank forced to pump vast amounts of cash into local banks -- that is what Japan may have to contend with if it fails to tackle its snowballing debt.
* tank〈俗〉駄目になる、大失敗する、暴落する
Not long ago such doomsday scenarios would be dismissed in Tokyo as fantasies of ill-informed foreigners sitting on loss-making bets "shorting Japan."
* doomsday 最後の審判の日、この世の終わり、地球最後の日
* short...《証券》～を空売りする
Today this is what is on bureaucrats' minds in Japan's centre of political and economic power.
"It's scary when you think what could happen if there's triple-selling of bonds, stocks and the yen. The chance of this happening is bigger than markets think," says a senior official.
Leaning back in a leather sofa in his office, the official appears relaxed, but the way he wastes no time answering questions about a debt meltdown, suggests it is an all too familiar topic.
The official, like many others interviewed by Reuters, declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject and his alarm over Japan's $10 trillion-plus debt overhang has yet to be reflected in public debate or action. But these officials would be the ones pulling the levers in the command center if Japan were to be hit by a debt crisis.
* debt overhang 過剰債務
The government borrows more than it raises in taxes, and its debt pile amounts to two years' worth of Japan's economic output, the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world.
It costs Japan half of the country's tax income just to service its debt. Each year, Japan's debt level increases by more than the combined gross domestic product of Greece and Portugal.
* service〔負債を〕返済［償還］する、〔負債の利子を〕払う
Yet Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's plan to double the 5 percent sales tax to 10 percent over the next three years is seen as far too timid to stop debts from piling up.
Furthermore, he has yet to win over many in his own party and half of the public while the opposition threatens to scupper the plan, which it supports in principle, to force snap elections.
* scupper 〔計画などを〕駄目にする、破滅させる
* snap elections 解散総選挙
Technocrats who might have once dismissed worst-case scenarios are now beginning to take them seriously as doubts grow over whether Japan is ready to act and as Greece's budget meltdown stokes the euro zone's debt crisis.
Conventional wisdom is that Japan is safe as long as it keeps covering about 95 percent of its borrowing needs at home. What emerges from a dozen or so interviews with fund managers and officials versed in monetary and fiscal policy is that a risk of domestic investors going on a strike is what makes them particularly nervous.'
'(Reuters) - Capital flight, soaring borrowing costs, tanking currency and stocks and a central bank forced to pump vast amounts of cash into local banks -- that is what Japan may have to contend with if it fails to tackle its snowballing debt.
* tank〈俗〉駄目になる、大失敗する、暴落する
Not long ago such doomsday scenarios would be dismissed in Tokyo as fantasies of ill-informed foreigners sitting on loss-making bets "shorting Japan."
* doomsday 最後の審判の日、この世の終わり、地球最後の日
* short...《証券》～を空売りする
Today this is what is on bureaucrats' minds in Japan's centre of political and economic power.
"It's scary when you think what could happen if there's triple-selling of bonds, stocks and the yen. The chance of this happening is bigger than markets think," says a senior official.
Leaning back in a leather sofa in his office, the official appears relaxed, but the way he wastes no time answering questions about a debt meltdown, suggests it is an all too familiar topic.
The official, like many others interviewed by Reuters, declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject and his alarm over Japan's $10 trillion-plus debt overhang has yet to be reflected in public debate or action. But these officials would be the ones pulling the levers in the command center if Japan were to be hit by a debt crisis.
* debt overhang 過剰債務
The government borrows more than it raises in taxes, and its debt pile amounts to two years' worth of Japan's economic output, the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world.
It costs Japan half of the country's tax income just to service its debt. Each year, Japan's debt level increases by more than the combined gross domestic product of Greece and Portugal.
* service〔負債を〕返済［償還］する、〔負債の利子を〕払う
Yet Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's plan to double the 5 percent sales tax to 10 percent over the next three years is seen as far too timid to stop debts from piling up.
Furthermore, he has yet to win over many in his own party and half of the public while the opposition threatens to scupper the plan, which it supports in principle, to force snap elections.
* scupper 〔計画などを〕駄目にする、破滅させる
* snap elections 解散総選挙
Technocrats who might have once dismissed worst-case scenarios are now beginning to take them seriously as doubts grow over whether Japan is ready to act and as Greece's budget meltdown stokes the euro zone's debt crisis.
Conventional wisdom is that Japan is safe as long as it keeps covering about 95 percent of its borrowing needs at home. What emerges from a dozen or so interviews with fund managers and officials versed in monetary and fiscal policy is that a risk of domestic investors going on a strike is what makes them particularly nervous.'
Thursday, February 16, 2012
オリンパス：損失隠し 粉飾容疑、前会長ら逮捕
NYTの記事、'7 Arrested in Olympus Accounting Cover-Up' By HIROKO TABUCHI（Published: February 16, 2012）から。
'TOKYO — Arrests of seven people Thursday accused of involvement in the $1.7 billion accounting scandal at Olympus, including the company’s former chairman and executive vice president, point to a widening investigation into a cover-up ostensibly carried out by top management with the help of a group of former bankers.
* ostensibly うわべは、表向きは、表面上は
Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, who was the company’s chairman until the scandal broke last fall, was arrested in Tokyo as were two other former executives on suspicion of having falsified financial statements, Tokyo prosecutors said. Two former Nomura investment bankers who had been previously mentioned by investigators were also taken into custody, accused of violating securities laws. And so were two of the bankers’ apparent associates, whose names had not be previously publicized.
* the scandal broke 不祥事が浮上する
By aiming a spotlight on what critics say is Japan’s lax corporate governance, and casting a shadow over one of the country’s former blue-chip companies, the Olympus scandal has become a test of how far Japan is willing to go to fight white-collar crime.
* lax 〔規律などが〕緩い、手ぬるい
* cast a shadow over ... ～の上に（暗い）影を落とす［投じる・投げ掛ける］、～に暗影を投じる
Under Japanese securities laws, the men arrested Thursday could each serve up to 10 years if found guilty. But convictions for white collar-crime have been rare in Japan, and courts have been known to hand down suspended sentences even in egregious cases.
* serve 刑期を務める、服役する
Executives linked to a $350 million accounting scandal at the major Japanese brokerage firm Nikko Cordial in 2006 never served any jail time, for example.
* serve jail time 服役する
The former Olympus executives arrested, besides Mr. Kikukawa, according to the prosecutor’s office, were Hisashi Mori, the former executive vice president, who was fired after the scandal broke; and Hideo Yamada, a former internal auditor, who resigned in the scandal’s wake.
* in the ...’s wake ～の結果（として）、～があった［起こった・分かった］今［この時点で］
The Japanese authorities also arrested the two former Nomura bankers, Akio Nakagawa and Nobumasa Yokoo, who ran Global Company, an investment firm. The firm’s receipt of hundreds of millions of dollars in advisory fees from Olympus in the early 2000s, according to investigators, raised questions that eventually led to the accounting fraud’s being detected.
Two men who authorities described as the bankers’ associates, Taku Hada and Hiroshi Ono, were also arrested. Both had served on the board of Global. Mr. Hada was also listed as a director for three companies that Global is accused of helping Olympus to acquire, as part of the accounting fraud.
Efforts to reach lawyers for the arrested executives for comment were not successful.
The irregular accounting came to light in October after Olympus fired Michael C. Woodford, a Briton who was the company’s president and chief executive. At the time, Mr. Kikukawa, still the chairman, attributed the dismissal to Mr. Woodford’s aggressive Western management style.
* come to light 明るみに出る
* dismissal 〔人の〕免職、解職、解雇
But Mr. Woodford subsequently went public saying he had been fired for questioning a series of payouts made by the company from 2006 to 2008, and he provided what he said was evidence to the news media. Investigation by securities and law enforcement agencies in Japan, Britain and the United States ensued, as did an internal inquiry by an outside panel hired by Olympus.
* go public 公表する
Mr. Woodford then began a campaign to return and lead a turnaround at Olympus, whose share price has collapsed since the scandal broke. But he abandoned that effort in December after the company’s biggest domestic shareholders sided against him — an opposition that that some foreign investors have said confirms their worst fears of corporate Japan’s resistance to outsiders and change.
Mr. Woodford said Thursday in an e-mail that he felt vindicated by the arrests. “After going to hell and back, this is a day to remember,” he wrote.
* feel vindicated 正しさを立証されたと感じる、報われた気がする
Olympus said that it was aware of the gravity of the situation and was cooperating fully with the authorities.
The arrests, particularly of Mr. Hada and Mr. Ono, place new scrutiny on the obscure companies Olympus acquired in Japan from 2006 to 2008 for a total of almost $800 million.
Those companies — Altis, a medical waste recycling company; Humalabo, a facial cream maker; and News Chef, which makes plastic containers — were unprofitable and had little in common with Olympus’s main lines of business, which are cameras and medical equipment. Olympus wrote down the bulk of their value within the same fiscal year of the acquisitions.
* write down 値下げする、価額を切り下げる、減額する、評価損を計上する
Mr. Yokoo’s Global Company advised Olympus to make those acquisitions. But company filings show Mr. Yokoo himself had set up the three companies, in two cases using entities that had long gone dormant. According to Olympus’s investigative panel, the purchases and write-downs were used to account for earlier financial losses Olympus had never formally acknowledged.
* go dormant 休眠状態に入る［陥る］
Police officials are also investigating almost $700 million in fees Olympus paid to Global Company as an adviser on Olympus’s acquisition of Gyrus, a British medical equipment maker, in 2008. That fee amounted to more than a third of the $2 billion acquisition price, an advisory payment more than 30 times the norm. The Olympus panel has linked Mr. Nakagawa to that transaction.
Investors are now focusing on how Olympus will shore up its finances, as well as who will lead the company as it battles to regain credibility. In December, it restated five years’ worth of earnings, exposing a $1.1 billion hole in its balance sheet. That has led to speculation that it would need to merge with or sell itself to a competitor to stay afloat.
* shore up 補強する、強化する、てこ入れをする、建て直す
* balance sheet 貸借対照表【略】B/S
On Monday, Olympus forecast a $410 million loss for its financial year, which ends in March. Still, the current president, Shuichi Takayama, a longtime Olympus executive, said the company’s mainstay medical equipment business remained robust and that the company might not need to raise outside capital.
Also clouding Olympus’s outlook is the possibility of being delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, an action that could devastate its already battered share price. The exchange decided last month to keep Olympus listed for the time being, saying a cover-up orchestrated by a few executives did not merit a delisting. But the exchange indicated Thursday that it could revisit that decision based on fresh evidence.
* cloud 〔評判などを〕落とす、悪くさせる
Mr. Takayama is expected to step down at a shareholders’ meeting scheduled for April. He has been sued by Olympus over the scandal, along with 18 other former and current executives.'
'TOKYO — Arrests of seven people Thursday accused of involvement in the $1.7 billion accounting scandal at Olympus, including the company’s former chairman and executive vice president, point to a widening investigation into a cover-up ostensibly carried out by top management with the help of a group of former bankers.
* ostensibly うわべは、表向きは、表面上は
Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, who was the company’s chairman until the scandal broke last fall, was arrested in Tokyo as were two other former executives on suspicion of having falsified financial statements, Tokyo prosecutors said. Two former Nomura investment bankers who had been previously mentioned by investigators were also taken into custody, accused of violating securities laws. And so were two of the bankers’ apparent associates, whose names had not be previously publicized.
* the scandal broke 不祥事が浮上する
By aiming a spotlight on what critics say is Japan’s lax corporate governance, and casting a shadow over one of the country’s former blue-chip companies, the Olympus scandal has become a test of how far Japan is willing to go to fight white-collar crime.
* lax 〔規律などが〕緩い、手ぬるい
* cast a shadow over ... ～の上に（暗い）影を落とす［投じる・投げ掛ける］、～に暗影を投じる
Under Japanese securities laws, the men arrested Thursday could each serve up to 10 years if found guilty. But convictions for white collar-crime have been rare in Japan, and courts have been known to hand down suspended sentences even in egregious cases.
* serve 刑期を務める、服役する
Executives linked to a $350 million accounting scandal at the major Japanese brokerage firm Nikko Cordial in 2006 never served any jail time, for example.
* serve jail time 服役する
The former Olympus executives arrested, besides Mr. Kikukawa, according to the prosecutor’s office, were Hisashi Mori, the former executive vice president, who was fired after the scandal broke; and Hideo Yamada, a former internal auditor, who resigned in the scandal’s wake.
* in the ...’s wake ～の結果（として）、～があった［起こった・分かった］今［この時点で］
The Japanese authorities also arrested the two former Nomura bankers, Akio Nakagawa and Nobumasa Yokoo, who ran Global Company, an investment firm. The firm’s receipt of hundreds of millions of dollars in advisory fees from Olympus in the early 2000s, according to investigators, raised questions that eventually led to the accounting fraud’s being detected.
Two men who authorities described as the bankers’ associates, Taku Hada and Hiroshi Ono, were also arrested. Both had served on the board of Global. Mr. Hada was also listed as a director for three companies that Global is accused of helping Olympus to acquire, as part of the accounting fraud.
Efforts to reach lawyers for the arrested executives for comment were not successful.
The irregular accounting came to light in October after Olympus fired Michael C. Woodford, a Briton who was the company’s president and chief executive. At the time, Mr. Kikukawa, still the chairman, attributed the dismissal to Mr. Woodford’s aggressive Western management style.
* come to light 明るみに出る
* dismissal 〔人の〕免職、解職、解雇
But Mr. Woodford subsequently went public saying he had been fired for questioning a series of payouts made by the company from 2006 to 2008, and he provided what he said was evidence to the news media. Investigation by securities and law enforcement agencies in Japan, Britain and the United States ensued, as did an internal inquiry by an outside panel hired by Olympus.
* go public 公表する
Mr. Woodford then began a campaign to return and lead a turnaround at Olympus, whose share price has collapsed since the scandal broke. But he abandoned that effort in December after the company’s biggest domestic shareholders sided against him — an opposition that that some foreign investors have said confirms their worst fears of corporate Japan’s resistance to outsiders and change.
Mr. Woodford said Thursday in an e-mail that he felt vindicated by the arrests. “After going to hell and back, this is a day to remember,” he wrote.
* feel vindicated 正しさを立証されたと感じる、報われた気がする
Olympus said that it was aware of the gravity of the situation and was cooperating fully with the authorities.
The arrests, particularly of Mr. Hada and Mr. Ono, place new scrutiny on the obscure companies Olympus acquired in Japan from 2006 to 2008 for a total of almost $800 million.
Those companies — Altis, a medical waste recycling company; Humalabo, a facial cream maker; and News Chef, which makes plastic containers — were unprofitable and had little in common with Olympus’s main lines of business, which are cameras and medical equipment. Olympus wrote down the bulk of their value within the same fiscal year of the acquisitions.
* write down 値下げする、価額を切り下げる、減額する、評価損を計上する
Mr. Yokoo’s Global Company advised Olympus to make those acquisitions. But company filings show Mr. Yokoo himself had set up the three companies, in two cases using entities that had long gone dormant. According to Olympus’s investigative panel, the purchases and write-downs were used to account for earlier financial losses Olympus had never formally acknowledged.
* go dormant 休眠状態に入る［陥る］
Police officials are also investigating almost $700 million in fees Olympus paid to Global Company as an adviser on Olympus’s acquisition of Gyrus, a British medical equipment maker, in 2008. That fee amounted to more than a third of the $2 billion acquisition price, an advisory payment more than 30 times the norm. The Olympus panel has linked Mr. Nakagawa to that transaction.
Investors are now focusing on how Olympus will shore up its finances, as well as who will lead the company as it battles to regain credibility. In December, it restated five years’ worth of earnings, exposing a $1.1 billion hole in its balance sheet. That has led to speculation that it would need to merge with or sell itself to a competitor to stay afloat.
* shore up 補強する、強化する、てこ入れをする、建て直す
* balance sheet 貸借対照表【略】B/S
On Monday, Olympus forecast a $410 million loss for its financial year, which ends in March. Still, the current president, Shuichi Takayama, a longtime Olympus executive, said the company’s mainstay medical equipment business remained robust and that the company might not need to raise outside capital.
Also clouding Olympus’s outlook is the possibility of being delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, an action that could devastate its already battered share price. The exchange decided last month to keep Olympus listed for the time being, saying a cover-up orchestrated by a few executives did not merit a delisting. But the exchange indicated Thursday that it could revisit that decision based on fresh evidence.
* cloud 〔評判などを〕落とす、悪くさせる
Mr. Takayama is expected to step down at a shareholders’ meeting scheduled for April. He has been sued by Olympus over the scandal, along with 18 other former and current executives.'
食品新規制値で放射線審前会長 関係学会へ投稿要請
Japan Timesの記事、'Panel OKs lower cesium limit for food' Kyodo (Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012)から。
'A government panel approved Thursday a proposal for far stricter limits on radioactive cesium found in food, paving the way for the health ministry to enforce the new limits in April.
* pave the way for ... ～の地固めをする、～の下地を作る
The Radiation Council under the science ministry said that to provide a generous safety margin, the new limits are based on the false assumption that most food products are contaminated with cesium following the explosions last March at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.
* safety margin 安全（性）の限界
The panel also said food with cesium levels slightly above the new limits would have little effect on human health.
Because the new limits could impede sales of farm products from Fukushima Prefecture, the government should respect the views of producers as much as possible in enforcing them, it said.
* impede 遅らせる、妨げる、邪魔をする
The new limits, which come between one-twentieth and one-quarter of the present tentative limits depending on the food category, are set at 100 becquerels per kilogram for regular food items such as rice and meat, compared with the current 500 becquerels , 50 becquerels for milk and infant food, and 10 becquerels for drinking water.
Otsura Niwa, head of the Radiation Council, said 100 becquerels is a safe enough level and there's no need to separate food for infants in a family with small kids.
The new limits are intended to curb the total internal exposure to cesium from food to less than 1 millisievert per year. The current limit is 5 millisieverts a year.
* curb 抑制する、抑える、阻止する、食い止める、防止する、制限する、～に歯止めをかける
The health ministry proposed the new limits in December after debating the matter, then asked the Radiation Council to judge if the proposal was appropriate.'
'A government panel approved Thursday a proposal for far stricter limits on radioactive cesium found in food, paving the way for the health ministry to enforce the new limits in April.
* pave the way for ... ～の地固めをする、～の下地を作る
The Radiation Council under the science ministry said that to provide a generous safety margin, the new limits are based on the false assumption that most food products are contaminated with cesium following the explosions last March at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.
* safety margin 安全（性）の限界
The panel also said food with cesium levels slightly above the new limits would have little effect on human health.
Because the new limits could impede sales of farm products from Fukushima Prefecture, the government should respect the views of producers as much as possible in enforcing them, it said.
* impede 遅らせる、妨げる、邪魔をする
The new limits, which come between one-twentieth and one-quarter of the present tentative limits depending on the food category, are set at 100 becquerels per kilogram for regular food items such as rice and meat, compared with the current 500 becquerels , 50 becquerels for milk and infant food, and 10 becquerels for drinking water.
Otsura Niwa, head of the Radiation Council, said 100 becquerels is a safe enough level and there's no need to separate food for infants in a family with small kids.
The new limits are intended to curb the total internal exposure to cesium from food to less than 1 millisievert per year. The current limit is 5 millisieverts a year.
* curb 抑制する、抑える、阻止する、食い止める、防止する、制限する、～に歯止めをかける
The health ministry proposed the new limits in December after debating the matter, then asked the Radiation Council to judge if the proposal was appropriate.'
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
As Japan Works to Patch Itself Up, a Rift Between Generations Opens
NYTの記事、'As Japan Works to Patch Itself Up, a Rift Between Generations Opens'
By NORIMITSU ONISHI (February 12, 2012)から。
'ONAGAWA, Japan — At age 39, Yoshiaki Suda, the new mayor of this town that was destroyed by last March’s tsunami, oversees a community where the votes, money and influence lie among its large population of graying residents. But for Onagawa to have a future, he must rebuild it in such a way as to make it attractive to those of his generation and younger.
* graying residents 高齢化
* in such a way as to ... ...という方法で、...するように
“That’s the most difficult problem,” Mr. Suda said. “For whom are we rebuilding?”
The reconstruction of Onagawa and the rest of the coast where the tsunami hit is a preview of what may be the most critical test Japan will face in the decades ahead. In a country where power rests disproportionately among older people, how does Japan, which has the world’s most rapidly aging population, use its dwindling resources to build a society that looks to the future as much as to the past?
* dwindling 〔徐々に〕減少する、小さくなる
The clashing generational interests are perhaps most striking here in Onagawa, a town of 8,500 residents whose average age of 49.5 is above the national average of 45. The evolving debate over the shape of Onagawa’s reconstruction underscores how older Japanese, more attached to their land and customs, are wielding disproportionate influence and swaying local governments into issuing reconstruction blueprints at odds with Tokyo’s stated goal of creating long-term sustainable communities.
* at odds with ... ～と不和で、～と争って、～と意見が食い違って、～との関係が悪化して
The debate here centers on the future of Onagawa’s rapidly aging and depopulated fishing villages, which, reachable only by twisting mountain roads, dot peninsulas that spread east and south of the town center here. Three other villages, located on two nearby islands, depend on a ferry that runs only three days a week for access to the mainland.
So after the tsunami destroyed all 15 of the fishing villages that make up part of Onagawa, Nobutaka Azumi, then the mayor, proposed a reconstruction plan that seemed sensible enough: consolidate the villages. Having just a few centralized communities would save the town money, Mr. Azumi said, and perhaps increase their chances of long-term survival.
* consolidate 合同する、合併する、統合する
But the village elders fought back, saying they wanted the government to rebuild their ancestral villages so that they could spend their last years there. Younger residents, many of whom supported consolidation but were vastly outnumbered, were left grumbling among themselves.
* outnumber ～に数で勝る、数で凌駕する、～の数を上回る、～より数が多い
After the mayor persisted, he was pushed out of office by Mr. Suda, who was backed by opponents of consolidation. Mr. Suda now says that all the villages will be rebuilt, including a hamlet with just 22 inhabitants and an island village whose residents are on average 74 years old.
“There were 15 locations, so there will be 15 locations,” Mr. Suda said. “We’re moving forward under the premise that there will be no centralization, though I’m thinking of asking them one last time if this is really O.K., whether their young relatives are in agreement.”
In Tokyo, reconstruction officials say they are aware that the voices of young people are not being heard on the ground.
* on the ground 現場で
“It’s an extremely difficult problem,” said Yoshio Ando, an official at Reconstruction Headquarters.
But the governing Democratic Party — as sensitive to the power of aging rural voters as its predecessor, the Liberal Democratic Party — contributed to the problem. National ministries are overseeing most of the tsunami-hit area’s large reconstruction projects out of a recently approved $120 billion budget.
But Tokyo is handing $25 billion directly to regional and local governments to refashion their communities, a boon to politically connected construction companies. The thinking is that local officials understand their communities best, but local politicians and bureaucrats are also less likely to make tough decisions like sacrificing some villages to make others stronger — and to lower the reconstruction costs that are likely to sap already strained financial resources.
* boon 〔時宜にかなった〕恩恵、恵み
boon to ... ...にとって恩恵となるもの
* sap ～を弱らせる、〔活力などを〕徐々に奪う
Mr. Ando said that Tokyo was counting on local governments to come up with plans that were in keeping with the affected zone’s demographic realities.
* count on ... to 〜 ...に〜するのを期待する、頼る
* in keeping with... ～と一致［調和］して、～と調子を合わせて、～と足並みをそろえて、～を順守して、～に沿って［従って］、～を踏まえて
“Local governments may be unable to persuade their residents, but the national government is not considering going in and doing so forcibly,” Mr. Ando said. “To put it negatively, we’re passing the buck. To put it positively, it’s not for the national government to judge.”
* pass the buck 責任転嫁する
After the disaster, even as debris from the tsunami was still being cleared, Onagawa’s officials addressed head-on what other local governments barely whispered: rebuilding communities that had been dying before the tsunami made no sense.
* head-on 真っ正面（から）の
“I understand that you want to remain in your villages, but what will happen in 10 years?” Mr. Azumi, the former mayor, asked in May, according to the minutes of a meeting.'
By NORIMITSU ONISHI (February 12, 2012)から。
'ONAGAWA, Japan — At age 39, Yoshiaki Suda, the new mayor of this town that was destroyed by last March’s tsunami, oversees a community where the votes, money and influence lie among its large population of graying residents. But for Onagawa to have a future, he must rebuild it in such a way as to make it attractive to those of his generation and younger.
* graying residents 高齢化
* in such a way as to ... ...という方法で、...するように
“That’s the most difficult problem,” Mr. Suda said. “For whom are we rebuilding?”
The reconstruction of Onagawa and the rest of the coast where the tsunami hit is a preview of what may be the most critical test Japan will face in the decades ahead. In a country where power rests disproportionately among older people, how does Japan, which has the world’s most rapidly aging population, use its dwindling resources to build a society that looks to the future as much as to the past?
* dwindling 〔徐々に〕減少する、小さくなる
The clashing generational interests are perhaps most striking here in Onagawa, a town of 8,500 residents whose average age of 49.5 is above the national average of 45. The evolving debate over the shape of Onagawa’s reconstruction underscores how older Japanese, more attached to their land and customs, are wielding disproportionate influence and swaying local governments into issuing reconstruction blueprints at odds with Tokyo’s stated goal of creating long-term sustainable communities.
* at odds with ... ～と不和で、～と争って、～と意見が食い違って、～との関係が悪化して
The debate here centers on the future of Onagawa’s rapidly aging and depopulated fishing villages, which, reachable only by twisting mountain roads, dot peninsulas that spread east and south of the town center here. Three other villages, located on two nearby islands, depend on a ferry that runs only three days a week for access to the mainland.
So after the tsunami destroyed all 15 of the fishing villages that make up part of Onagawa, Nobutaka Azumi, then the mayor, proposed a reconstruction plan that seemed sensible enough: consolidate the villages. Having just a few centralized communities would save the town money, Mr. Azumi said, and perhaps increase their chances of long-term survival.
* consolidate 合同する、合併する、統合する
But the village elders fought back, saying they wanted the government to rebuild their ancestral villages so that they could spend their last years there. Younger residents, many of whom supported consolidation but were vastly outnumbered, were left grumbling among themselves.
* outnumber ～に数で勝る、数で凌駕する、～の数を上回る、～より数が多い
After the mayor persisted, he was pushed out of office by Mr. Suda, who was backed by opponents of consolidation. Mr. Suda now says that all the villages will be rebuilt, including a hamlet with just 22 inhabitants and an island village whose residents are on average 74 years old.
“There were 15 locations, so there will be 15 locations,” Mr. Suda said. “We’re moving forward under the premise that there will be no centralization, though I’m thinking of asking them one last time if this is really O.K., whether their young relatives are in agreement.”
In Tokyo, reconstruction officials say they are aware that the voices of young people are not being heard on the ground.
* on the ground 現場で
“It’s an extremely difficult problem,” said Yoshio Ando, an official at Reconstruction Headquarters.
But the governing Democratic Party — as sensitive to the power of aging rural voters as its predecessor, the Liberal Democratic Party — contributed to the problem. National ministries are overseeing most of the tsunami-hit area’s large reconstruction projects out of a recently approved $120 billion budget.
But Tokyo is handing $25 billion directly to regional and local governments to refashion their communities, a boon to politically connected construction companies. The thinking is that local officials understand their communities best, but local politicians and bureaucrats are also less likely to make tough decisions like sacrificing some villages to make others stronger — and to lower the reconstruction costs that are likely to sap already strained financial resources.
* boon 〔時宜にかなった〕恩恵、恵み
boon to ... ...にとって恩恵となるもの
* sap ～を弱らせる、〔活力などを〕徐々に奪う
Mr. Ando said that Tokyo was counting on local governments to come up with plans that were in keeping with the affected zone’s demographic realities.
* count on ... to 〜 ...に〜するのを期待する、頼る
* in keeping with... ～と一致［調和］して、～と調子を合わせて、～と足並みをそろえて、～を順守して、～に沿って［従って］、～を踏まえて
“Local governments may be unable to persuade their residents, but the national government is not considering going in and doing so forcibly,” Mr. Ando said. “To put it negatively, we’re passing the buck. To put it positively, it’s not for the national government to judge.”
* pass the buck 責任転嫁する
After the disaster, even as debris from the tsunami was still being cleared, Onagawa’s officials addressed head-on what other local governments barely whispered: rebuilding communities that had been dying before the tsunami made no sense.
* head-on 真っ正面（から）の
“I understand that you want to remain in your villages, but what will happen in 10 years?” Mr. Azumi, the former mayor, asked in May, according to the minutes of a meeting.'
Japan: 2 Reactors Are Cleared to Restart
NYTの記事、'Japan: 2 Reactors Are Cleared to Restart' By THE ASSOCIATED PRESSから。
'Japan has cleared the way to restart two idled nuclear reactors in coming months for the first time since the nuclear crisis in Fukushima last year, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Monday. The decision was made after the two Ohi reactors in western Fukui Prefecture passed a set of stress tests. After an earthquake and tsunami caused reactors at the Fukushima reactor complex to melt down last March, the government shut down all of the country’s 54 reactors to test their ability to withstand similar disasters. Only three reactors are now operating.'
＊ clear the way [for someone] to ... (障害物を取り除いて)[人が]...する道を開く
＊ withstand ... ...に耐える、持ちこたえる
'Japan has cleared the way to restart two idled nuclear reactors in coming months for the first time since the nuclear crisis in Fukushima last year, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Monday. The decision was made after the two Ohi reactors in western Fukui Prefecture passed a set of stress tests. After an earthquake and tsunami caused reactors at the Fukushima reactor complex to melt down last March, the government shut down all of the country’s 54 reactors to test their ability to withstand similar disasters. Only three reactors are now operating.'
＊ clear the way [for someone] to ... (障害物を取り除いて)[人が]...する道を開く
＊ withstand ... ...に耐える、持ちこたえる
Monday, February 13, 2012
第4四半期、日本のGDP2.3%の縮小
CNNの記事、'Japan's GDP shrinks 2.3% in fourth quarter' By Ben McLannahan (February 13, 2012)から。
'Japan's economy shrank for the third time in four quarters between October and December, after floods in Thailand damaged production and a strong yen and subdued overseas demand hurt exports.
* subdued 抑制された
Cabinet Office figures on Monday showed that real GDP fell an annualized 2.3 per cent in the fourth quarter, much worse than consensus forecasts of a 1.3 per cent decline. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, output fell by 0.6 per cent, dragged down by exports -- which fell 3.1 per cent -- following a 1.7 per cent rise in the third quarter.
* annualized 年率換算で
* output 生産（高）
The nation's currency has eased only a little since hitting a postwar high of Y75.35 against the US dollar in October. The trade balance for 2011 showed a deficit of Y2.5 trillion ($32 billion) -- the first annual deficit in 31 years -- as exports to the eurozone and Asia, including China, fell sharply.'
* ease only a little 若干弱まる
'Japan's economy shrank for the third time in four quarters between October and December, after floods in Thailand damaged production and a strong yen and subdued overseas demand hurt exports.
* subdued 抑制された
Cabinet Office figures on Monday showed that real GDP fell an annualized 2.3 per cent in the fourth quarter, much worse than consensus forecasts of a 1.3 per cent decline. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, output fell by 0.6 per cent, dragged down by exports -- which fell 3.1 per cent -- following a 1.7 per cent rise in the third quarter.
* annualized 年率換算で
* output 生産（高）
The nation's currency has eased only a little since hitting a postwar high of Y75.35 against the US dollar in October. The trade balance for 2011 showed a deficit of Y2.5 trillion ($32 billion) -- the first annual deficit in 31 years -- as exports to the eurozone and Asia, including China, fell sharply.'
* ease only a little 若干弱まる
Sunday, February 12, 2012
ギリシャ、Austerity Planは有効なのか？
NYTの記事、Greek Parliament Passes Austerity Plan as Riots Rage By NIKI KITSANTONIS and RACHEL DONADIO （February 12, 2012）から。
ATHENS — After violent protests left dozens of buildings aflame in Athens, the Greek Parliament voted early on Monday to approve a package of harsh austerity measures demanded by the country’s foreign lenders in exchange for new loans to keep Greece from defaulting on its debt.
＊ default on its debt （その当事者）の債務の不履行
Though it came after days of intense debate and the resignation of several ministers in protest, in the end the vote on the austerity measures was not close: 199 in favor and 74 opposed, with 27 abstentions or blank ballots. The Parliament also gave the government the authority to sign a new loan agreement with the foreign lenders and approve a broader arrangement to reduce the amount Greece must repay to its bondholders.
＊ abstentions 棄権／blank ballots 白紙投票
The new austerity measures include, among others, a 22 percent cut in the benchmark minimum wage and 150,000 government layoffs by 2015 — a bitter prospect in a country ravaged by five years of recession and with unemployment at 21 percent and rising.
But the chaos on the streets of Athens, where more than 80,000 people turned out to protest on Sunday, and in other cities across Greece reflected a growing dread — certainly among Greeks, but also among economists and perhaps even European officials — that the sharp belt-tightening and the bailout money it brings will still not be enough to keep the country from going over a precipice.
＊ a precipice 窮地、危機
Angry protesters in the capital threw rocks at the police, who fired back with tear gas. After nightfall, demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails, setting fire to more than 40 buildings, including a historic theater in downtown Athens, the worst damage in the city since May 2010, when three people were killed when protesters firebombed a bank. There were clashes in Salonika in the north, Patra in the west, Volos in central Greece, and on the islands of Crete and Corfu.
Greece and its foreign lenders are locked in a dangerous brinkmanship over the future of the nation and the euro. Until recently, a Greek default and exit from the euro zone was seen as unthinkable. Now, though experts say that the European Union is not prepared for a default and does not want one, the dynamic has shifted from trying to save Greece to trying to contain the damage if it turns out to be unsalvageable.
＊ brinkmanship 瀬戸際（外交）
“They’re trying to lay the ground for it, trying to limit the contagion from it,” said Simon Tilford, the chief economist at the Center for European Reform, a research institute in London. Still, he added, letting Greece go would set a dangerous precedent, and it would be “fanciful” to think otherwise.
＊ fanciful 非現実的な
Greece’s limping economy yields large trade and budget deficits, and none but the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund — known collectively as the troika — are willing to lend the nation the money it needs to stay afloat. The troika is demanding more concessions to placate Germany and other northern European countries, where the bailout of Greece is a hard sell to voters. For its part, Greece is trying to preserve social and political cohesion in the face of growing unrest, political extremism and a devastated economy that is expected to worsen with more austerity. And the feeling is growing here and abroad that the troika’s strategy for Greece is failing.
＊ stay afloat 何とか成り立っている
＊ placate 〜 〜をなだめる
ATHENS — After violent protests left dozens of buildings aflame in Athens, the Greek Parliament voted early on Monday to approve a package of harsh austerity measures demanded by the country’s foreign lenders in exchange for new loans to keep Greece from defaulting on its debt.
＊ default on its debt （その当事者）の債務の不履行
Though it came after days of intense debate and the resignation of several ministers in protest, in the end the vote on the austerity measures was not close: 199 in favor and 74 opposed, with 27 abstentions or blank ballots. The Parliament also gave the government the authority to sign a new loan agreement with the foreign lenders and approve a broader arrangement to reduce the amount Greece must repay to its bondholders.
＊ abstentions 棄権／blank ballots 白紙投票
The new austerity measures include, among others, a 22 percent cut in the benchmark minimum wage and 150,000 government layoffs by 2015 — a bitter prospect in a country ravaged by five years of recession and with unemployment at 21 percent and rising.
But the chaos on the streets of Athens, where more than 80,000 people turned out to protest on Sunday, and in other cities across Greece reflected a growing dread — certainly among Greeks, but also among economists and perhaps even European officials — that the sharp belt-tightening and the bailout money it brings will still not be enough to keep the country from going over a precipice.
＊ a precipice 窮地、危機
Angry protesters in the capital threw rocks at the police, who fired back with tear gas. After nightfall, demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails, setting fire to more than 40 buildings, including a historic theater in downtown Athens, the worst damage in the city since May 2010, when three people were killed when protesters firebombed a bank. There were clashes in Salonika in the north, Patra in the west, Volos in central Greece, and on the islands of Crete and Corfu.
Greece and its foreign lenders are locked in a dangerous brinkmanship over the future of the nation and the euro. Until recently, a Greek default and exit from the euro zone was seen as unthinkable. Now, though experts say that the European Union is not prepared for a default and does not want one, the dynamic has shifted from trying to save Greece to trying to contain the damage if it turns out to be unsalvageable.
＊ brinkmanship 瀬戸際（外交）
“They’re trying to lay the ground for it, trying to limit the contagion from it,” said Simon Tilford, the chief economist at the Center for European Reform, a research institute in London. Still, he added, letting Greece go would set a dangerous precedent, and it would be “fanciful” to think otherwise.
＊ fanciful 非現実的な
Greece’s limping economy yields large trade and budget deficits, and none but the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund — known collectively as the troika — are willing to lend the nation the money it needs to stay afloat. The troika is demanding more concessions to placate Germany and other northern European countries, where the bailout of Greece is a hard sell to voters. For its part, Greece is trying to preserve social and political cohesion in the face of growing unrest, political extremism and a devastated economy that is expected to worsen with more austerity. And the feeling is growing here and abroad that the troika’s strategy for Greece is failing.
＊ stay afloat 何とか成り立っている
＊ placate 〜 〜をなだめる
福島２号機温度計の値上昇についてThe Guardian最新ニュース
'Fukushima reactor readings raise reheating concern:Temperature inside No 2 reactor may have risen to 82C, and Tepco reportedly steps up cooling efforts' by Justin McCurry (12/Feb/2012)から。
福島第一原子力発電所２号機で、原子炉の一部の温度計の値が上昇していることについて、The Guardianの最新ニュースです。
'Concern is growing that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan is no longer stable after temperature readings suggested one of its damaged reactors was reheating.
* temperature readings 温度計読み取り
The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), said the temperature inside No 2 reactor – one of three that suffered meltdown after last year's earthquake and tsunami – may have reached 82C on Sunday.
Tepco said there was no evidence that the melted fuel inside had reached criticality. The utility reportedly increased the amount of cooling water being injected into the reactor along with a boric acid solution, which is used to prevent the fuel from undergoing sustained nuclear reactions.
* melted fuel 溶けた燃料
* reach criticality 臨界に達する
* boric acid ホウ酸
Confirmation that the temperature has risen above 80C could force the government to reverse its declaration two months ago that the crippled plant was in a safe state known as cold shutdown.
* reverse 〜 〜を覆す、無効にする
reverse its declaration （政府の冷温停止の）宣言を無効にする
* cold shutdown 冷温停止
Cold shutdown is achieved when the temperature inside the reactors remains below 100C and there is a significant reduction in radiation leaks. Given that Tepco assumes a margin of error of 20C, the actual temperature could have risen to 102C.
* a margin of error of 〜 〜（前後）の誤差
Plant workers are unable to take accurate readings of the temperature inside the damaged reactor because radiation levels are still too high for them to enter and examine the state of the melted fuel, which is thought to be resting at the bottom of the reactor's pressure vessel.
* be resting 休止している
restの動詞、進行形です。
The result has been a series of wildly different readings: two other thermometers positioned at the bottom of No 2 reactor showed the temperature at 35C, local media reported.
Tepco said it did not know the cause of the apparent temperature rise, but speculated that it might be due to problems with the supply of coolant or a faulty thermometer.
* a faulty thermometer 温度計の故障
"We believe the state of cold shutdown is being maintained," said Junichi Matsumoto, a company spokesman. ”Rather than the actual temperature rising, we believe there is high possibility that the thermometer concerned is displaying erroneous data."
* erroneous data 間違ったデータ
Tepco was forced to inject additional cooling water into the same reactor last week after the temperature started rising at the beginning of the month.'
福島第一原子力発電所２号機で、原子炉の一部の温度計の値が上昇していることについて、The Guardianの最新ニュースです。
'Concern is growing that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan is no longer stable after temperature readings suggested one of its damaged reactors was reheating.
* temperature readings 温度計読み取り
The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), said the temperature inside No 2 reactor – one of three that suffered meltdown after last year's earthquake and tsunami – may have reached 82C on Sunday.
Tepco said there was no evidence that the melted fuel inside had reached criticality. The utility reportedly increased the amount of cooling water being injected into the reactor along with a boric acid solution, which is used to prevent the fuel from undergoing sustained nuclear reactions.
* melted fuel 溶けた燃料
* reach criticality 臨界に達する
* boric acid ホウ酸
Confirmation that the temperature has risen above 80C could force the government to reverse its declaration two months ago that the crippled plant was in a safe state known as cold shutdown.
* reverse 〜 〜を覆す、無効にする
reverse its declaration （政府の冷温停止の）宣言を無効にする
* cold shutdown 冷温停止
Cold shutdown is achieved when the temperature inside the reactors remains below 100C and there is a significant reduction in radiation leaks. Given that Tepco assumes a margin of error of 20C, the actual temperature could have risen to 102C.
* a margin of error of 〜 〜（前後）の誤差
Plant workers are unable to take accurate readings of the temperature inside the damaged reactor because radiation levels are still too high for them to enter and examine the state of the melted fuel, which is thought to be resting at the bottom of the reactor's pressure vessel.
* be resting 休止している
restの動詞、進行形です。
The result has been a series of wildly different readings: two other thermometers positioned at the bottom of No 2 reactor showed the temperature at 35C, local media reported.
Tepco said it did not know the cause of the apparent temperature rise, but speculated that it might be due to problems with the supply of coolant or a faulty thermometer.
* a faulty thermometer 温度計の故障
"We believe the state of cold shutdown is being maintained," said Junichi Matsumoto, a company spokesman. ”Rather than the actual temperature rising, we believe there is high possibility that the thermometer concerned is displaying erroneous data."
* erroneous data 間違ったデータ
Tepco was forced to inject additional cooling water into the same reactor last week after the temperature started rising at the beginning of the month.'
Thursday, February 9, 2012
「残業と憂鬱の関係性」、さてその研究結果は？
The Ageの記事、'Can overtime cause depression?' by Anahad O'Connorから。
(February 7, 2012)
トピックは「残業は憂鬱を引き起こす要因なのか？」その研究結果について。
'Routinely working long hours is associated with a greater risk of depression, studies show.
Routinely putting in extra hours at the office can put a strain on your social life. But can too much overtime cause depression?
Scientists put the question to the test in a study of more than 2,000 white-collar workers. Previous research hinted at a link between long hours and depressed mood, and the researchers, at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki, wanted to examine the issue in depth.
For about five years, they collected data on British civil servants. All of the workers, whose average age at the start was 47, had no mental health problems at the outset. And the researchers adjusted their results to rule out other risk factors, like socioeconomic status, social support, gender and substance use.
Ultimately, the men and women who routinely worked 11 hours a day or more had more than double the risk of developing depression compared with those who usually worked eight hours or less.'
* put a strain on ...
「...に負担をかける」
* put the question to ...
「その質問を...にかける」
* more than double ...
「２倍以上の...がある」
この場合は、「１日１１時間かそれ以上継続的に働いた男女は、１日８時間かそれ以下働いた人よりも憂鬱になるリスクが２倍以上ある」という意味で使われています。
(February 7, 2012)
トピックは「残業は憂鬱を引き起こす要因なのか？」その研究結果について。
'Routinely working long hours is associated with a greater risk of depression, studies show.
Routinely putting in extra hours at the office can put a strain on your social life. But can too much overtime cause depression?
Scientists put the question to the test in a study of more than 2,000 white-collar workers. Previous research hinted at a link between long hours and depressed mood, and the researchers, at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki, wanted to examine the issue in depth.
For about five years, they collected data on British civil servants. All of the workers, whose average age at the start was 47, had no mental health problems at the outset. And the researchers adjusted their results to rule out other risk factors, like socioeconomic status, social support, gender and substance use.
Ultimately, the men and women who routinely worked 11 hours a day or more had more than double the risk of developing depression compared with those who usually worked eight hours or less.'
* put a strain on ...
「...に負担をかける」
* put the question to ...
「その質問を...にかける」
* more than double ...
「２倍以上の...がある」
この場合は、「１日１１時間かそれ以上継続的に働いた男女は、１日８時間かそれ以下働いた人よりも憂鬱になるリスクが２倍以上ある」という意味で使われています。
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