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Coca-Cola has always been more focused on its economic bottom line than on global warming, but when the company lost a profitable operating license in India because of a serious water shortage there in 2004, things began to change. Today, after a decade of increasing damage to Coke's balance sheet as global droughts dried up the water needed to produce its soda, the company has embraced the idea of climate change as an economically disruptive force. "Increased droughts, more unpredictable variability, 100-year floods every two years," said Jeffrey Seabright, Coke's vice president for environment and water resources, listing the problems that he said were also disrupting the company's supply of sugar cane and sugar beets (甜菜). "When we look at our most essential ingredients, we see those events as threats." Coke reflects a growing view among American business leaders and mainstream economists who see global warming as a force that contributes to lower GDP's, higher food and commodity costs, broken supply chains and increased financial risk. Their position is at striking odds with the longstanding argument, advanced by the coal industry and others, that policies to curb carbon emissions are more economically harmful than the impacts of climate change. In Washington, the World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, has put climate change at the center of the bank's mission, citing global warming as chief contributor to rising global poverty rates and falling GDP's in developing nations. In Europe, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based club of 34 industrialized nations, has begun to warn of Ihe steep costs of increased carbon pollution. Nike, which has more than 700 factories in 49 countries, many in Southeast Asia, is also speaking out because of extreme weather that is disrupting its supply chain. In 2008, floods temporarily shut down four Nike factories in Thailand, and the company remains concerned about rising droughts in regions that produce cotton, which the company uses in its athletic clothes. Both Nike and Coke are responding internally: Coke uses water-conservation technologies and Nike is using more synthetic material that is less dependent on weather conditions. At Davos and in global capitals, the companies are also lobbying governments to enact environmentally friendly policies.

Are Bad Economic Times Good for Health?[A] Most people are worried about the health of the economy. But does the economy also affect your health? It does, but not always in ways you might expect. The data on how an economic downturn influences an individual's health are surprisingly mixed. It's clear that long-term economic gains lead to improvements in a population's overall health, in developing and industrialized societies alike.[B] But whether the current economic downturn will take a toll on your own health depends, in part, on your health habits when times are good. And economic studies suggest that people tend not to take care of themselves in boom times—drinking too much (especially before driving), dining on fat-filled restaurant meals and skipping exercise and doctors' appointments because of work-related time commitments.[C] "The value of time is higher during good economic times," said Grant Miller, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford. "So people work more and do less of the things that are good for them, like cooking at home and exercising: and people experience more stress due to the severity of hard work during booms."[D] Similar patterns have been seen in some developing nations. Dr. Miller, who is studying the effects of fluctuating coffee prices on health in Colombia, says that even though falling prices are bad for the economy, they appear to improve health and decrease death rates. When prices are low, laborers have more time to care for their children. "When coffee prices suddenly rise, people work harder on their coffee plots and spend less time doing things around the home, including things that are good for their children," he said. "Because the things that matter most for infant and child health in rural Colombia aren't expensive, but require a substantial amount of time—such as breast-feeding, bringing clean water from far away, taking your child to a distant health clinic for free vaccinations (接种疫苗) —infant and child death rates rise."[E] In this country, a similar effect appeared in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, according to a 2007 paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The data seem to contradict research in the 1970s suggesting that in hard times there are more deaths from heart disease, cirrhosis (肝硬化), suicide and murder, as well as more admissions to mental hospitals. But those findings have not been repeated, and several economists have pointed out flaws in the research.[F] In May 2000, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a surprising paper called "Are Recessions Good for Your Health?" by Christopher J. Ruhm, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, based on an analysis measuring death rates and health behavior against economic shifts and jobless rates from 1972 to 1991. Dr. Ruhm found that death rates declined sharply in the 1974 and 1982 recessions, and increased in the economic recovery of the 1980s. An increase of one percentage point in state unemployment rates correlated with a 0.5 percentage point decline in the death rate—or about 5 fewer deaths per 100,000 people. Over all, the death rate fell by more than 8 percent in the 20-year period of mostly economic decline, led by drops in heart disease and car crashes.[G] The economic downturn did appear to take a toll on factors having less to do with prevention and more to do with mental well-being and access to health care. For instance, cancer deaths rose 23 percent, and deaths from flu and pneumonia increased slightly. Suicides rose 2 percent, homicides 12 percent.[H] The issue that may matter most in an economic crisis is not related to jobs or income, but whether the slump widens the gap between rich and poor, and whether there is an adequate health safety net available to those who have lost their jobs and insurance. During a decade of economic recession in Japan that began in the 1990s, people who were unemployed were twice as likely to be in poor health as those with secure jobs. During Peru's severe economic crisis in the 1980s, infant deaths jumped 2.5 percentage points—about 17,000 more children who died as public health spending and social programs collapsed.[I] In August, researchers from the Free University of Amsterdam looked at health studies of twins in Denmark. They found that individuals bom in a recession were at higher risk for heart problems later in life and lived, on average, 15 months less than those born under better conditions. Gerard J. van den Berg, an economics professor who was a co-author of the study, said babies in poor households suffered the most in a recession, because their families lacked access to good health care. Poor economic conditions can also cause stress that may interfere with parent bonding and childhood development, he said. He noted that other studies had found that recessions can benefit babies by giving their parents more time at home.[J] "This scenario (情况) may be relevant for well-to-do families where one of the parents loses a job and the other still brings in enough money," he said. "But in a crisis where the family may have to face huge housing-cost losses and the household income is insufficient for adequate nutrition and health care, the disadvantageous effects of being born in a recession seem much more relevant."[K] In the USA, there are already signs of the economy's effect on health. In May, the market research firm Information Resources reported that 53 percent of consumers said they were cooking more than they did just six months before—in part, no doubt, because of the rising cost of prepared foods. At the same time, health insurance costs are rising. With premiums and co-payments, the average employee with insurance pays nearly one-third of medical costs—about twice as much as four years ago, according to Paul H. Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions.[L] In the United States, which unlike other industrialized nations lacks a national health plan, the looming recession may take a greater toll. About 46 million Americans lack health insurance, Dr. Keckley says, and even among the 179 million who have it, an estimated 1 in 7 would be bankrupted by a single health crisis. The economic downturn "is not good news for the health care industry," he said. "There may be something positive, but I think this needs pondering."

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How science goes wrong Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself.[A] A simple idea underlies science: "trust, but verify". Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better. But success can breed extreme self-satisfaction. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying, damaging the whole of science, and of humanity.[B] Too many of the findings are the result of cheap experiments or poor analysis. A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated (复制). Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 "milestone" studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist worries that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are nonsense. In 2000-10, roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later withdrawn because of mistakes or improperness.What a load of rubbish[C] Even when flawed research does not put people's lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it blows money and the efforts of some of the world's best minds. The opportunity costs of hindered progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.[D] One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the Second World War, it was still a rarefied (小众的) pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled to 6m-7m active researchers on the latest account, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to "publish or perish (消亡)" has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs strive for every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other people's results) does little to advance a researcher's career. And without verification, uncertain findings live on to mislead.[E] Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the choose-the-most-profitable of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has polished a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results based on his instinct. And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, it is more likely that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a nut of the statistical noise. Such fake correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, or letting children play video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.[F] Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis (假设) are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. "Negative results" now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.[G] The holy process of peer review is not all it is praised to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.If it's broke, fix it[H] All this makes a shaky foundation for an enterprise dedicated to discovering the truth about the world. What might be done to shore it up? One priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have done most to tighten standards. A start would be getting to grips with statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that screen through untold crowds of data looking for patterns. Geneticists have done this, and turned an early stream of deceptive results from genome sequencing (基因组测序) into a flow of truly significant ones.[I] Ideally, research protocols (草案) should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to manipulate the experiment's design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are. (It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of drugs.) Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.[J] The most enlightened journals are already showing less dislike of tedious papers. Some government funding agencies, including America's National Institutes of Health, which give out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication. And growing numbers of scientists, especially young ones, understand statistics. But these trends need to go much further. Journals should allocate space for "uninteresting" work, and grant-givers should set aside money to pay for it. Peer review should be tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules. [K] Science still commands enormous—if sometimes perplexed—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the universe is short of genuine mysteries to keep generations of scientists hard at work. The false trails laid down by cheap research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding.

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TV Linked to Lower Marks[A]The effect of television on children has been debated ever since the first sets were turned on. Now three new studies find that too much tube time can lower test scores, retard learning and even predict college performance. The reports appear in the July issue of the Archives of Pediatrics Adolescent Medicine.[B]In the first report, researchers studied the effect that having a TV in a child' s bedroom can have on third graders. "We looked at the household media environment in relation to academic achievement on mathematics, reading and language arts tests," said study author Dina L. G. Borzekowski, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.[C]Borzekowski and her colleague, Dr. Thomas Robinson of Stanford University, collected data on 386 third graders and their parents about how much TV the children watched, the number of TV sets, computers and video game consoles in the household and where they were. They also collected data on how much time the children spent using the different media, as well as the time spent doing homework and reading. The researchers found that the media in the household, where it is and how it is used can have a profound effect on learning. " We found that the household media environment has a very close association with performance on the different test scores," Borzekowski said.[D]"A child who has a TV in his or her bedroom is likely to have a score that is eight points lower on a mathematics test compared to a child who doesn' t have a TV in the bedroom," she noted. These children also scored lower on the reading and language arts tests. However, children who have access to a home computer are likely to have higher scores on each of the tests compared with children who don ' t have access to a home computer, Borzekowski noted.[E]The reasons why TV has this negative effect are not clear, Borzekowski said. "When there' s TV in the bedroom, parents are less likely to have control over the content and the amount watched," Borzekowski said. "They are also unable to know how early or how late the set is on. This seems to be associated with kids' performance on academic tests. " Borzekowski believes that content and the time the TV is on may be the primary reasons for its negative effect. " If the TV is in the family room, then parents can see the content of what children are watching," she said. " Parents can choose to sit alongside and watch, or turn the set off. A simple and straightforward, positive parenting strategy is to keep the TV out of the child' s bedroom, or remove it if it' s already there. "[F]In the second report, Dr. Robert J. Hancox from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and his colleagues found, regardless of your intelligence or social background, if you watch a lot of TV during childhood, you are a lot less likely to have a college degree by your mid-20s. In their study, the researchers followed 1 ,037 people born in 1972 and 1973. Every two years, between the ages of 5 and 15, they were asked how much television they watched. The researchers found that those who watched the most television during these years had earned fewer degrees by the time they were 26. " We found that the more television the child had watched, the more likely they were to leave school without any qualifications," Hancox said in a prepared statement. " Those who watched little television had the best chance of going on to university and earning a degree. "[G]Hancox' s team found that watching TV at an early age had the most effect on graduating from college. " An interesting finding was that although teenage viewing was strongly linked to leaving school without any qualifications, it was earlier childhood viewing that had the greatest impact on getting a degree," he said. "This suggests that excessive television in younger children has a long-lasting adverse effect on educational performance.[H]In the third paper, Frederick J. Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis from the University of Washington report that, for very young children, watching TV can result in lower test scores in mathematics, reading recognition and reading comprehension. "We looked at how much television children watched before age 3 and then at ages 3 to 5," Zimmerman said. " We found that for children who watched a small amount of TV in the earlier years, there was considerable beneficial effect compared to children who watched a lot of TV. "[I]For children aged 3 to 5, the effect was not as clear, Zimmerman said. "There were some beneficial effects of watching TV on reading, but no beneficial effects for math or vocabulary," he noted. "The worst pattern was to watch more than three hours of TV before age 3. Those kids had a significant disadvantage compared to the other kids. " "Parents should follow the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation, which is no TV for children under 2," Zimmerman said. " Personally, I feel the cutoff should be children under 3, because there is just not any good content for children under 3. "[J]One expert believes that TV can have both positive and negative effects, but it all depends on what children are watching. " Content matters," said Deborah L. Linebarger, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored an accompanying editorial. "Educational content has been found to be related to performance on school readiness tests, higher grades when they are teenagers, whereas, non-educational content tends to be associated with lower academic performance. "[K]Another expert agrees. "TV watching takes up space that could be used by more useful things," said Dr. Christopher P. Lucas, a clinical coordinator at the Early Childhood Evaluation and Treatment Program at the New York University Child Study Center. "TV is not necessarily toxic, but is some-thing that has to be done in moderation: something that balances the other needs of the child for healthy development. "[L]Lucas puts the responsibility for how much TV kids watch and what they watch squarely on parents. "The amount of TV watching certainly has a link with the reduced amount of time reading or doing homework," he said. " The key is the amount of control parents have in limiting the amount of access. Get the TV out of the bedroom: be aware of what is being watched: limit the amount of TV watching. "

如今，中国自行车年增长率不超过10％，但高端自行车(high-end bike)年增长率却高达40％。

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Big is Back A) Corporate giants were on the defensive for decades. Now they have the advantage again. In 1996, in one of his most celebrated phrases, Bill Clinton declared that "the era of big government is over". He might have added that the era of big companies was over, too. The organisation that defined capitalism for much of the 20th century was then in retreat, attacked by corporate raiders, annoyed by shareholders and outwitted by entrepreneurs (企业家). Great names such as Pan Am had disappeared. Others had survived only by huge bloodletting: IBM sacked 122,000 people, a quarter of its workforce, between 1990 and 1995. Everyone agreed that the future lay with entrepreneurial start-ups such as Yahoo! —which in late 1998 had the same market capitalisation with 637 employees as Boeing with 230,000. The share of GDP produced by big industrial companies fell by half between 1974 and 1998, from 36% to 17%. B) Today the balance of advantage may be shifting again. To a degree, the financial crisis is responsible. It has destroyed the venture-capital market, the lifeblood of many young firms. Governments have been rescuing companies they consider too big to fail, such as Citigroup and General Motors. Recession is squeezing out smaller and less well-connected firms. But there are other reasons too, which are giving big companies a self-confidence they have not displayed for decades. C) Of course, big companies never went away. There were still plenty of first-rate ones: Unilever and Toyota continued to innovate through thick and thin. And not all start-ups were models of success: Netscape and Enron promised to revolutionise their industries only to crash and burn. Nevertheless, the balance had shifted in favour of small organisations. The entrepreneurial boom was supercharged by two developments. Deregulation (撤销管制规定) opened protected markets. Some national champions, such as AT&T, were broken up. Others saw their markets eaten up by swift-footed newcomers. The arrival of the personal computer in the 1970s and the internet in the 1990s created an army of successful start-ups. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer in 1976 in the Jobs family's garage. Microsoft and Dell Computer were both founded by teenagers (in 1975 and 1984 respectively). Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in Stanford dorm rooms. D) But deregulation had already begun to go out of fashion before the financial crisis. The Sarbanes-Oxley act, introduced after Enron collapsed in disgrace, increased the regulatory burden on companies of all sizes, but what could be borne by the big could cripple the small. Many of today's most dynamic industries are much more friendly to big companies than the IT industry. Research in biotechnology is costly and often does not bear fruit for years. Natural-resource companies, whose importance grows as competition for resources intensifies, need to be big—hence the mining industry's consolidation. E) Two further developments are shifting the balance of advantage in favour of size. One is a heightened awareness of the risks of subcontracting (转包合同). Toy companies and pet-food firms alike have found that their brands can be hurt if their suppliers turn out goods of poor quality. Big industrial companies have learned that their production cycles can be broken up if contractors are not up to the mark. Boeing, once a champion of subcontracting, has been forced to take over slow suppliers. A second is the emergence of companies that have discovered how to be entrepreneurial as well as big. These giants are getting better at minimising the costs of size (such as longer, more complex chains of managerial command) while exploiting its advantages (such as presence in several markets and access to a large talent pool). Cisco Systems is pioneering the use of its own video technology to improve communications between its employees. IBM has carried out several company-wide brainstorming exercises, recently involving more than 150,000 people, that have encouraged it to put more emphasis, for example, on green computing. Disney has successfully taken Pixar's creative magic. F) You might suppose that the return of the mighty, now better equipped to crush the competition, is something to worry about. Not necessarily. Big is not always ugly just as small is not always beautiful. Most entrepreneurs dream of turning their start-ups into giants (or at least of selling them to giants for a fortune). There is a symbiosis (互利合作关系) between large and small. "Cloud computing" would not provide young firms with access to huge amounts of computer power if big companies had not created giant servers. Biotech start-ups would go bust were they not given work by giants with deep pockets. G) The most successful economic ecosystems contain a variety of big and small companies: Silicon Valley boasts long-established names as well as an ever-changing array of start-ups. America's economy has been more dynamic than Europe's in recent decades not just because it is better at giving birth to companies but also because it is better at letting them grow. Only 5% of European Union companies born since 1980 have made it into the list of the 1,000 biggest in the EU by market capitalisation. In America, the figure is 22%. H) The return of the giants could well be a blessing for the world economy—but only if business people and policymakers avoid certain mistakes. Businesses should not admire size blindly, particularly if this means diversifying into a lot of unrelated areas. The model of joint business may be tempting when cash is hard to find. But the moment will not last. By and large, the most successful big firms focus on their core businesses. I) Policymakers should both resist an instinctive suspicion of big companies and avoid the old error of embracing national champions. It is bad enough that governments have diverted resources into supporting failing companies such as General Motors. It would be even more regrettable if they were to return to picking winners. The best use of their energies is to remove the burdens and barriers which prevent entrepreneurs from starting businesses and turning small companies into big ones.

每年随着中国高校开学日期临近，家长们就开始忙着为孩子购置各种物品。笔记本电脑、手机和银行卡是许多大学新生新学期的“ 三件套 ”(three-piece suit)。一些学生还准备了相机、游戏机和其他 时尚产品 (trendyproduct)。相关学者称这些学生花钱太大手大脚。也有一些家长表示，他们会满足孩子的基本需求，但是如果孩子想花更多钱或生活得更好，则需要他们自己去挣钱实现。

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