2016年3月31日 星期四

week4--丹麥女孩

There’s a scene in The Danish Girl in which a group of female shop assistants in 1920s Copenhagen are told by their supervisor that serving customers is a matter of performance. One new recruit gives a knowing smile, as well she might; for she is Lili Elbe, born a male named Einar Wegener, and knows a thing or two about playing a role. Based on the true story of a pioneering recipient of gender reassignment surgery, and on David Ebershoff’s book of the same name, Tom Hooper’s drama constantly emphasises the dimension of acting in gender identity – but too often in the film, performance blurs uneasily with pantomime.
In 2015, transgender themes and characters achieved their greatest media visibility yet: on TV, Transparent and BBC2’s Boy Meets Girl; in the cinema, Tangerine and the Australian drama 52 Tuesdays; in the real world (or at least, that hazy zone where it intersects with planet Vanity Fair), Caitlyn Jenner. While arguably the most mainstream-friendly of such phenomena, The Danish Girl is manifestly serious in intent. Yet it’s a laboured, glossy affair in which the complexity and challenge of Lili’s process of becoming are buried under a glaze of sumptuous design and arch acting.
When we first meet young painters Einar (Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander), they are enjoying a happy, tender marriage, marred only by the disparity between their professional levels of success. Einar is an acclaimed creator of stark Nordic landscapes, while Gerda is getting nowhere as a portraitist – not least because the gallery system is reluctant to accommodate women. Then one day their dancer friend Ulla (an alarmingly high-spirited Amber Heard) is late for a portrait sitting. Gerda persuades her husband to deputise in stockings and ballet shoes – and slender-legged Einar visibly experiences a frisson of self-revelation. Later, Einar comments appreciatively on Gerda’s new negligee: “I might let you wear it,” Gerda says, teasingly. “I might enjoy it,” Einar replies. Pause. Gerda (warily): “Is there something you’d like me to know?”

There are several such touches in Lucinda Coxon’s script that flirt awkwardly and self-consciously with farce. There’s the scene where Einar first cross-dresses in public, and attracts an intrigued admirer, played by Ben Whishaw. “You’re different from most girls,” hazards the wistful Whishaw, a moment that Lili’s tart response – “That’s not a very original line” – can’t salvage from absurdity.
The film’s biggest problem – but clearly also its hot selling point – is Redmayne’s performance. It is a very physical rendering: the emphasis is on Einar learning how to be Lili, and Redmayne nicely captures Einar’s study of a certain stylised female body language, with every tilt of his head and turn of his ankle. But he also overdoes it. Affectingly exuberant as he was playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Redmayne here lays it on with a pearl-handled trowel, relentlessly working the toothy grins and coy averted gazes; you almost expect him to whip out a fan to flutter his eyelashes behind.
Meanwhile, Vikander makes it clear that Gerda is a tough modern woman, but ticks the 21st-century “feistiness” box a little too briskly. The Swedish star uses much the same languidly patrician English accent as she did in Testament of Youth, though with a more louchely mannered intonation, as if she permanently has a cigarette holder in her mouth (and often she does).
Despite Lili’s eventual historic operation, performed by surgeon Dr Warnekros (an undemonstrative but impressive Sebastian Koch), we get only the most superficial sense of the protagonist undergoing a process that is any way dangerous, or indeed physical. This overall abstraction is underwritten by the film’s aesthetic gloss. It’s all quite gorgeous – Eve Stewart’s designs, Paco Delgado’s costumes and Danny Cohen’s photography combine to make a luscious, painterly production. Yet Hopper overuses the beauty – too many scenes are distractingly dominated by a perfect frock or a ravishing art nouveau window.
The film aims to capture the struggle of self-realisation, much as Hooper did to such acclaim in The King’s Speech, but there’s little dramatic weight; here his precise, calculated style invokes feeling, rather than stirs it. In tailoring its story to the requirements of prestige costume drama, this decorous, bloodless film removes the operating table from Lili Elbe’s story and puts the coffee table in its place.
structure of lead:
WHO-Lili Elbe
WHERE-not mentioned
WHEN-not mentioned
WHY-emphasize om the dimension of acting in gender identity
HOW-not mentioned
KEY WORDS:
1. dimension 範圍;特點
2. pantomime 啞劇;手勢
3. intent 熱切的;專心致志的
4. disparity 不同;差距
5. negligee (女式)長袍
6. render 描繪; 表演
7. wistful 渴望的;留戀的
8. exuberant 生氣勃勃的
9. intonation 語調
10. ravishing 令人陶醉的
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2016年3月24日 星期四

week4-台灣霸王寒流

A rare sight of snow wowed people nationwide yesterday, from Taipei to Pingtung County.
Under the influence of a strong cold air mass, many places in Taiwan — even those located at an altitude of only 400m to 500m — received a covering of snow or soft hail overnight, exciting locals, who likely have never seen snow in real life since they were born.
Despite low temperatures, people were seen swarming to elevated areas, including Keelung’s 726m-high Jiangziliaoshan (姜子寮山), Taipei’s Yangmingshan (陽明山) and New Taipei City’s Linkou (林口) and Pinglin (坪林) districts, to appreciate the natural beauty of the snow.
As of yesterday morning, the accumulated snow had reached 20cm in Taoyuan’s Lalashan (拉拉山) Forest Recreation Area.
The Motian (摩天嶺-) mountain area along the Southern Cross-Island Highway also reported showers of snow started at 4am yesterday, as well as on Yunlin County’s Jiananyun Peak (嘉南雲峰), where snow began falling at about 11am yesterday at an altitude of about 1,500m.
Under the influence of a cold air mass, the outlying island group of Penghu experienced soft hail yesterday morning.
Pingtung County’s Dawushan (大武山) also reported soft hail from halfway up the mountain to the summit at midnight on Saturday.
The Central Weather Bureau said 27 weather stations in different parts of Taiwan registered their lowest temperatures yesterday.
The temperature in Taipei fell to 4ºC, the lowest level detected in the capital in 44 years and the second-lowest since 3.2 degrees was recorded in 1972.
It was minus-3.1ºC in the Yangmingshan area, 5.8ºC in Yilan County’s Suao (蘇澳), and 4.2ºC in Taoyuan’s Sinwu District (新屋) — all new lows for these places. In New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋), it was 3.8ºC yesterday morning — the second-lowest level in history.
The temperature in Taipei is forecast to dip to 3ºC early today, while central and southern regions are expected to experience temperatures of 4ºC and 6ºC respectively, the bureau said.
Chances of precipitation are expected to be low across the nation today, apart from in mountainous regions higher than 600m.
The bureau urged people to be aware of icy road conditions.
The bureau has issued special warnings for low temperatures and heavy rain across Taiwan, urging the public to take precautions and keep warm before the cold wave leaves Taiwan tomorrow, when temperatures across the nation are expected to rebound noticeably.


Structure of Lead:
WHO- not mentioned
WHERE- from Taipei to Pingtung county
WHEN- yesterday
WHY- under the influence of a strong cold air mass
HOW- cause a rare sight of snow

Key words:
1. swarm 湧入;擠滿
2. elevated area 高的地區
3. register 登記;註冊
4. dip 浸泡;舀取
5. precipitation 降雪量;凝結
6. rebound 回升
7. noticeably 明顯的;顯著的
8. hail 下冰雹;喝采
9. overnight 突然;一夜之間
10. respectively 分別的;獨自的

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2016年3月10日 星期四

week3-牛津字典2015代表字

It's a historic moment of recognition for little images that have been gaining popularity since 1999

Oxford Dictionaries made history on Monday by announcing that their “Word of the Year” would not be one of those old-fashioned, string-of-letters-type words at all. The flag their editors are planting to sum up who we were in 2015 is this pictograph, an acknowledgement of just how popular these pictures have become in our (digital) daily lives
“Although emoji have been a staple of texting teens for some time, emoji culture exploded into the global mainstream over the past year,” the company’s team wrote in a press release. “Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.”
Oxford University Press—which publishes both the august Oxford English Dictionary and the lower-brow, more-modern Oxford Dictionaries Online—partnered with keyboard-app company SwiftKey to determine which emoji was getting the most play this past year. According to their data, the “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji, also known as LOL Emoji or Laughing Emoji, comprised nearly 20% of all emoji use in the U.S. and the U.K., where Oxford is based. The runner-up in the U.S., with 9% of usage, was this number
Caspar Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, explained that their choice reflects the walls-down world that we live in. “Emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders,” he said in a statement. And their choice for the word of the year, he added, embodies the “playfulness and intimacy” that characterizes emoji-using culture.
Though this marks a historic moment of recognition for the pictures plastered throughout tweets and texts, Oxford has not added or defined any emoji in their actual databases. Nor, says a spokesperson for the publisher, do they have plans to do so at this point. The word emoji, however, has been in both the OED and Oxford Dictionaries Online since 2013.

Japanese telecommunications planner Shigetaka Kurita is credited with inventing these little images in 1999, taking the emoticons that had been gaining steam on the Internet to an iconic level. Inspired by comics and street signs, the name for the alphanumeric images comes from combining the Japanese words for picture (e-) and character (moji). “It’s easy to write them off as just silly little smiley faces or thumbs-up,” sociolinguist Ben Zimmer told TIME for a story on how emoji fit into humans’ long history of using pictures to communicate. “But there’s an awful lot of people who are very interested in treating them seriously.”
time.com/4114886/oxford-word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/
Lead of Structure:
WHO- Oxford Dictionary
WHERE- not mentioned
WHEN- not mentioned
WHAT- the word of the year is an emoji
WHY- the emojis have gained their popularity since 1999
HOW- not mentioned
Key Words:
1. pictograph 象形
2. staple 主要的(adj.) 訂書針(n.)
3. embody 使具體化
4. core ascept 核心概念
5. august 尊嚴的(adj.)
6. linguistic 語言學的
7. runner-up 亞軍
8. emoji 表情符號
9. transcend 超越
10. telecommunication 電信
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2016年3月3日 星期四

week2-看見台灣

Beauty: Taiwan from Above (看見台灣) is to be screened at the Osaka Asian Film Festival next month, marking the first time the film’s stunning aerial photography and call for environmental awareness will be seen by audiences abroad.
The highest-grossing documentary in local box office history, Beyond Beauty is to be screened at the festival, which runs from March 7 to 16, along with other Taiwanese films, including the historical drama-baseball film Kano.
“We hope to take Beyond Beauty outside Taiwan for the world to see,” Chi said.
Several international festivals have expressed interest in the documentary, he said, listing overseas showings as a “major goal” for his team this year.
Beyond Beauty has made more than NT$200 million (US$6.59 million) at the local box office as of Feb. 15, since it premiered on Nov. 1 last year.
The documentary highlights the country’s natural beauty and the damage done to its mountains, rivers and oceans by natural disasters and human beings.
It has been credited with spurring government action to tackle a high-profile polluter of industrial waste and to crack down on illegal guesthouses in a scenic area.
Taiwan Aerial Imaging Inc, which produced the film, said it is currently in talks with film festivals in China and Hong Kong, among others, to screen the film, but does not yet have plans for overseas theater releases.
Another major goal for the director is “charity screenings” throughout the nation so that more people can see the film.
Starting in the middle of next month, Taiwan Aerial Imaging plans a series of free screenings in Nantou, Miaoli, Changhua and Yilan counties, Greater Tainan and Hualien over a period of two weeks.
The company said the screenings would be a show of gratitude to the people in each location who helped with the filming.
Meanwhile, the company said it has donated NT$5 million from the box office proceeds to four foundations that assisted with the project — the Delta Electronics Foundation, the Wistron Foundation, the Fubon Cultural and Educational Foundation and the International Commercial Bank of China Cultural and Educational Foundation.
Structure of Lead
WHO- not mentioned
WHERE- Taiwan
WHEN- next month
WHY- be screened at the Asia festival
HOW- not mentioned
Key Words:
1. aerial photography 空拍照
2.premiere 首映
3. be credited with 把...歸功於
4.spur 帶動
5 in talks 在會談
6.box office 票房
7.assist with 協助


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2016年2月25日 星期四

week1--美加州恐攻

A heavily armed man and woman in their 20s died in a shootout with police after killing 14 people at a Christmas party in California in the worst mass shooting in the US in three years, authorities said.
Police identified the pair as Syed Farook, a 28-year-old US citizen who worked for the local county, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, whose nationality was unknown. They said the suspects were either married or engaged.
San Bernardino’s police chief Jarrod Burguan confirmed that both were dead and that police no longer believed a third suspect mentioned earlier was at large.
The shooters targeted a year-end party taking place at a social services center in San Bernardino, about an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles, killing 14 people and wounding 17.
“We don’t have the motive at this point,” Burguan said. “We have not ruled out terrorism.”
The massacre drew an angry response from US President Barack Obama, who once again urged the US Congress to pass tougher gun control measures to stem the nation’s epidemic of gun violence.
Burguan said Farook was an environmental inspector who had worked for the county health department for five years.
He and Malik were dressed in military-style gear and carried assault weapons as they burst into the auditorium where the bloodbath took place.
The hall was let out for the holiday party by the Inland Regional Center for the Disabled.
Burguan said Farook had attended the Christmas party organized by the health department and left after an apparent dispute, only to return a short time later with Malik, armed with assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns.
“Based upon how they were equipped, there had to be some degree of planning that went into this,” Burguan said.
“I don’t think they just ran home and put on these tactical clothes, grabbed guns and came back on a spur of the moment thing,” he said.
He said the attackers left explosive devices behind and authorities were only able to access the scene of the crime several hours after the shooting.
There was no information on the identity of the victims.
FBI agents in the early evening raided an apartment in the nearby town of Redlands, where the two suspects were seen before the police chase that ended in a shootout a few kilometers from the Inland Center.
The California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations denounced the killings.
Farook’s brother-in-law, Farhan Khan, said he had no idea what prompted the carnage.
“I am in shock that something like this could happen,” a visibly shaken Khan told a press conference organized by the council.
The Los Angeles Times quoted some of Farook’s coworkers as saying he had previously traveled to Saudi Arabia and returned with a new wife.
The couple had a six-month-old daughter and appeared to be “living the American dream,” Patrick Baccari, a fellow inspector who shared a cubicle with Farook, told the newspaper.
It was the nation’s deadliest shooting incident since Dec. 14, 2012, when a young man killed 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.


Structure of Lead:
WHO- Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik
WHERE- in California
WHEN-not mentioned
WHY-not mentioned
HOW- by shooting

KEYWORDS:
1. at large 未被逮捕
2. massacre  屠殺
3. tactical  戰術
4. denounce  譴責
5. carnage  大屠殺
6. ruled out  排除
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2016年1月1日 星期五

week6-巴黎恐攻

Friday's Paris assaults mark a new and frightening watershed in the steady expansion of attacks attributed to or claimed by the so-called Islamic State.
For most of last year and much of this, IS's focus has been on taking and holding territory in the Middle East. For its leaders in Raqqa and Mosul, that is still the priority.
But the militants are well aware of their transnational appeal to violent jihadists in Europe and elsewhere.

As they reel under the daily onslaught of US-led coalition airstrikes, haemorrhaging one leader after another, they are increasingly looking to direct or inspire attacks further afield.

Careful planning

In June, IS claimed a gun attack at a Tunisian beach resort in Sousse that killed 38 tourists, 30 of them British.
In October Turkey blamed a suicide attack killing 102 people in Ankara on IS. Later that month, IS's Sinai affiliate claimed to have brought down a Russian airliner, killing all 224 people on board.
On 12 November, IS claimed the bomb attack on the Hezbollah stronghold in south Beirut that left 44 people dead. And then came Paris, with at least 120 dead and over 300 injured.
These are not isolated, lone wolf, spur-of-the-moment attacks.
Although not necessarily difficult to execute, these attacks still took planning, preparation, training, sourcing of weapons and explosives, reconnaissance of the target and the careful recruitment of so-called "martyrs" - fanatical young men prepared to carry them out in the full knowledge they will probably die doing so.
This is far more reminiscent of al-Qaeda's modus operandi in the early 2000s, going for big publicity, high-casualty attacks that make headlines around the world.
Western counter-terrorism officials had recently come round to the conclusion that while there were still people aspiring to such grand-scale attacks, the prevailing threat was more likely to come from "self-starters", people like the murderers of British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich near London in 2013.
In the light of what has happened in Paris and elsewhere, they may now be revising that assessment.

Closing the window

There is also another factor here. The 1000-mile (1,600km) Turkey-Syria border used to present little obstacle to the thousands of would-be jihadists coming from Europe to swell the ranks of IS.
While the border is still porous in places, much of it on the Syrian side is now controlled by the YPG, a Kurdish militia opposed to IS.
So the "window" through which new recruits can cross has narrowed considerably. Iraq is not a realistic transit route for European jihadists to reach Syria, Jordan's border is closed and in Lebanon there is a high risk of being caught by security forces.
The net result is that IS's online recruiters have recently been encouraging their followers to stay in their own countries and plan attacks there, rather than attempt the risky journey to Syria.
In the short term at least, this will translate into a heightened chance of terrorist attacks here in Europe.

Structure of Lead:
WHO- Islamic State
WHERE- Paris
WHEN-  friday's Paris
WHY- not mentioned
WHAT- a frightening and  watershed attack happened in Paris
HOW- by a steady expansion of attacks
Keywords:
1.militant 激進分子
2.coalition 聯盟
3.stronghold 據點
4.spur-of-the-moment 臨時起意
5.reconnaissance 偵查
6.fanatical 狂熱的
7.reminiscent 讓人聯想起
8.assessment 評定
9.jihadists 聖戰者
10.martyrs 烈士
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2015年12月17日 星期四

week5 - 全球購物狂歡節(光棍節)

More than $1 billion worth of goods were sold over Alibaba Group’s e-commerce platforms within the first 20 minutes of this year’s 11.11 Shopping Festival, with nearly half of all transactions taking place via mobile devices.
The milestone—$1 billion in total GMV (gross merchandise volume)—was reached on Nov. 11 at 12:17 a.m. During the 24-hour sale last year, it took about an hour to reach the $1 billion mark for all transactions on Alibaba Group’s retail platforms.
Nearly 48 percent of the sale's first $1 billion in GMV were transactions placed by smartphones and other mobile devices. Mobile GMV surpassed RMB 1 billion ($163 million) less than five minutes after the sale began.
The start of the annual e-shopathon was witnessed by more than 500 journalists who were on hand at an auditorium at Alibaba Group’s headquarters in Hangzhou, China. There, they watched  the sales totals climb on a large monitor, which displayed other near-real-time statistics and geographical data such as regions in China where online purchasing was hottest.
Alibaba Group is rolling out the sale worldwide this year. The strongest overseas traffic was coming from Hong Kong, the U.S. and Taiwan.
“Behind the scenes and behind the numbers are millions of merchants and millions of partners who worked together with us to create this festival for consumers,” Alibaba Group COO Daniel Zhang told reporters prior to the start of the sale. The largest 24-hour online sale in the world, the 11.11 Shopping Festival this year involves some 27,000 merchants and brands selling over Alibaba shopping websites Tmall.com, Taobao Marketplace, AliExpress and Tmall Global.
Last year’s 24-hour sale saw $5.8 billion worth of goods transacted over Alibaba Group’s Tmall.com and Taobao Marketplace platforms, making it the biggest shopping day in the world, topping the sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.
The sale this year will be another test of Alibaba’s expanding e-commerce ecosystem, which includes not only its online shopping platforms but also affiliate companies such as e-payments provider Alipay and China Smart Logistics, a consortium of shipping and delivery companies. “This is a very unique phenomenon for the ecosystem,” Zhang said of the 11.11 Shopping Festival. “This cannot be done by just one company but it can be done by an ecosystem.”
With more and more Chinese consumers shopping on mobile phones this year, Zhang said prior to the sale, Tmall.com and Taobao Marketplace used so-called “big data” technology to optimize the 11.11 shopping experience, using software algorithms to predict and display items they may like on their mobile phones. “What we are doing this year is to give people a more data-driven and personalized (mobile) pages so people can access the content they are interested in,” Zhang said.
Previous 11.11 Shopping Festivals have been limited largely to the mainland. But for the first time this year, AliExpress, Alibaba Group’s English-language consumer shopping platform will be participating, offering 50 percent off on one million products to customers overseas. The AliExpress sale will start at midnight PST. Chinese consumers will also be able to buy discounted imports through Tmall Global.
http://www2.alizila.com/online-shopping-binge-gets-strong-start

Structure of Lead:
WHO- Alibaba Group
WHAT- over 1 billian worth of good were sold by Alibaba group
WHEN- November 11st
WHERE- not mentioned
WHY-  not mentioned
HOW- through mobile devices

Keywords:
1. transaction  交易
2. gross merchandise volume 商品交易總額
3. surpass 超過
4. roll out 推出
5. affiliate 子公司
6. optimize 優化
7. algorithm 算法
8. retail platform 零售平台
9. headquarter 總部
10. geographical 地域
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