广岛原爆60周年，对Iran，DPRK核问题综述。
A Glimmer of Hope
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Published: August 6, 2005
It may be only a few more days before the world finds out whether Iran and North Korea are willing to give up nuclear weapons in exchange for broad economic incentives and firm security guarantees. The Bush administration, in a welcome change from the days when John Bolton ran its nonproliferation policies, is now making a serious diplomatic effort to achieve fair and realistic deals with both countries. It is time for Tehran and Pyongyang to show diplomatic seriousness as well, by recognizing that any agreement must apply not just to the making of nuclear bombs, but also to the capacity to produce weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.
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Both countries protest that they want to engage in such activities only for purposes of civilian power generation or scientific research, and they point out that international law permits this. Such arguments are quite beside the point. A country that can produce bomb-grade uranium or plutonium is a country that can produce nuclear bombs. The point of these talks is to remove that danger, not to perpetuate it.
Yesterday, with full American backing, Britain, France and Germany offered Iran an impressive set of inducements to renounce its threatening nuclear programs. Though the details are secret, the offer includes trade preferences, security guarantees, technology transfers and access to imported nuclear fuel for power reactors.
In return, Iran would have to take the one step it has so far resisted: giving up its programs for enriching uranium. That includes a process Iran has said it is about to resume, the conversion of its raw uranium into a gas for feeding into enrichment centrifuges. If it goes ahead with that plan and spurns the new offer, the European countries are prepared to take the issue to international nuclear regulators, eventually including the United Nations Security Council, which has the power to impose punitive sanctions.
North Korea faces similar decisions. Over the past week and a half, the funereal nuclear discussions involving the United States, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China have begun to show a pulse. The Bush administration has shown a new willingness to address the central issues in one-on-one talks with the North Koreans. China, the host of the negotiations, has taken a more active role in trying to draft compromise language and seems newly determined to press for a successful outcome. And North Korea has put aside its belligerent blustering and agreed to the vaguely defined goal of a denuclearized Korean peninsula.
Still, North Korea has not moved enough. Like Iran, it pretends that an agreement to give up nuclear weapons does not have to include a ban on uranium enrichment and plutonium separation. And it wants to retain reactors for power and research, even though it has diverted such reactors in the past to weapons-related work.
Those conditions are untenable, as all the other participants in the talks can clearly see. The case for banning ostensibly peaceful nuclear activities in North Korea is even stronger than it is for Iran, because Pyongyang's nuclear weapons programs are far more advanced and it has formally withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. If North Korea refuses to recognize this reality, it will be walking away from a proposed package that offers it almost everything else it has ever asked for, including explicit security assurances from the United States, generous financial aid from South Korea and improved relations with all of its neighbors.
The administration's new nuclear diplomacy has produced a remarkable show of international unity. Europe's major powers have joined Washington in insisting on an end to Iran's uranium enrichment programs. Asia's major powers agree with Washington that a deal with North Korea should ban the capacity to make bomb fuel as well as bombs.
This extraordinary moment in the long effort to restrain nuclear weapons comes just as the world is commemorating the 60th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. The terrible devastation inflicted on those two Japanese cities and their inhabitants demonstrates why controlling nuclear arms is such a deadly serious business for all of humanity. Iran and North Korea need to respond with appropriate seriousness.
Measuring the Blogosphere
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Published: August 5, 2005
Earlier this week, Technorati, a Web site that indexes blogs, released its semiannual "State of the Blogosphere" report. It records a steady, and astonishing, growth. Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day, and there are some 14.2 million in existence already, 55 percent of which remain active. Some 900,000 new blog postings are added every day - a steady increase marked by extraordinary spikes in new postings after incidents like the London bombing. The blogosphere - that is, the virtual realm of blogdom as a whole - doubles in size every five and a half months.
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If the blogosphere continues to expand at this rate, every person who has Internet access will be a blogger before long, if not an actual reader of blogs. The conventional media - this very newspaper, for instance - have often discussed the growing impact of blogging on the coverage of news. Perhaps the strongest indicator of the importance of blogdom isn't those discussions themselves, but the extent to which media outlets are creating blogs - or bloglike manifestations - of their own.
That is the serious side of the blogosphere. But blogs are often just a way of making oneself appear on the Internet. It's like a closed-circuit video camera that catches a glimpse of you walking by an electronics store window filled with televisions. There you are in all your glory, suddenly, if not forever, mediated. Starting your own blog used to require a certain amount of technical expertise. Now you can do it from within popular Web portals like MSN and AOL, using tools that make it almost as easy as sending e-mail. These days, a surprising number of people write home by posting to their blogs - that is, by writing to everyone on earth.
It's natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it's also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogosphere captures a little more of the strange immediacy of the life that is passing before us. Think of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species.
还要讲两个东西，一个是牵扯，一个是RL推荐信。牵扯，就是在不同材料中互相援引，
我不知道这是不是通病，我曾经犯过这样的错误。比如在写PS的时候，写写自己的过去
获得的成就和奖励不过瘾，又怕教授没仔细看CV，就会加一句（detailed information
please refer to my CV）；在CV里面介绍自己的研究经历又嫌烦，就写（detailed
research experience please refer to my PS/Writing Sample）；等等诸如此类。换
了随便谁去做录取委员，谁都会对这种申请材料心烦，然后扔掉。因此，在任何一个地
方都及时把当下的问题和观点解释清楚。第二个是关于Recommendation Letter，推荐信
。一般来说，国内是没有几个老师的信有很大作用的，国外的老师也未必有大作用。主
要还是要熟，你要是找到的老师和要申请的学校的教授很熟（至少在专业上很熟，如果
是谈得来的朋友就更好了），那么offer希望大大增加。或者你就得恰好幸运地认识什么
中科院社科院院士或者世界级的名人。如果这些都没找到，那么就不要太计较自己的推
荐信了，毕竟还是小老百姓比较多。三个推荐人就随便着吧，不要顾忌什么搭配，反正
原则就是，还比较了解你（当然只要信里这么表示的就行），在参与教学或科研，名气
还不是太烂。这些条件符合就可以啦。
都说申请和抽奖很像，也许真的很像，我们能完全控制的因素很少，但是不同之处在于
，一般的申请结果都是总会有几个offer或者至少一个offer，抽奖则基本上是肯定没戏
。但是有的时候，抽奖你买了十张彩票撕开都是"谢谢你的参与"但你有心理准备无所谓
，但是如果申了十所学校最后都说"Thank you for your interest but we cannot
give you the offer"，那打击就比较大了，毕竟申请的宗旨不是重在参与。尤其是看着
大伙儿都是从一月，二月，三月熬过来，却一个个拿到offer，越来越多的offer，可能
自己等到五月，六月，七月，最终都没有一个offer，看着大家忙着签证，忙着准备机票
行李，忙着和亲人朋友告别奔赴另一个新的生活，真的会非常非常难受。虽然我不想说
这些扫兴的话，但是每年，确实，每年总有那么一些为数不少的同学不能如愿以偿，也
许仅仅是运气不好，但是没有办法，就是没有offer，受着这样的心理煎熬。去年的夏天
是我有生以来真正知道什么叫"伤心"的日子。没有offer，找了一份随随便便的工作，毕
业了搬到一个随随便便的房子，每天过着随随便便的生活，吃着随随便便的饭菜，做着
随随便便的事情。感觉自己一下子远离了那么多可亲可爱的好朋友，一生中很重要的那
些朋友，有着共同理想的朋友，他们一个个飞走，我在这里，不知道是不是还能重新找
回自己的identification。看着朋友一个个离开，一个个送别，真是伤心，失落，难过
，甚至绝望。还好，第二年我中奖了。
后来找工作了，搬出学校了，下班躲在家里吹空调，抱着枕头哭（开玩笑的），大概7月
份这个Sutton教授又写信来了，说猪猪你还申请不，申请的话，我今年能在committee，
然后8月初我要来上海开会，我应该有空，也特别希望和你面谈一次好不好。当时我是很
高兴地答应了。但是7月底知道那几天我们公司正好组织去南方免费旅游，我赶紧写信给
他说教授真不好意思我这才知道公司要派我出差（当然不能说旅游啦），真是抱歉，多
希望和你会谈啊，虽然我决定申请艺术史了（这个也如实说了，因为当时决定了，也不
想再在人类学上纠缠了，就硬生生地说了），我还很十三点地怕他生气说教授要是我给
你留下了不好的印象请你不要把它归结为中国学生的共性，这只是我的糟糕特性。后来
他最后写了封信说真是遗憾猪猪，你完全没有给我留下不好的印象，我对你做出转方向
的决定感到遗憾，但是也祝福你，please don not hesitate to contact me in the
future。我再写信感谢。结束。
