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Curt Dunnam bought a Chevrolet Blazer with one of the most popular new features in high-end cars: the OnStar personal security system. The heavily advertised communications and tracking feature is used nationwide by more than two million drivers, who simply push a button to connect, via a built-in cellphone, to a member of the OnStar staff. A Global Positioning System, or G. P. S. , helps the employee give verbal directions to the driver or locate the car after an accident. The company can even send a signal to unlock car doors for locked-out owners, or honk the horn to help people find their cars in an endless plain of parking spaces. The biggest selling point for the system is its use in thwarting car thieves. Once an owner reports to the police that a car has been stolen, the company can track it to help intercept the thieves, a service it performs about 400 times each month. But for Mr. Dunnam, the more he learned about his car’s security features, the less secure he felt. He has enough technical knowledge to worry that someone else-law enforcement officers, or hackers-could listen in on his phone calls, or gain control over his automotive systems without his knowledge or consent. "While I don’t believe G. M. intentionally designed this system to facilitate such activities, they sure have made it easy," he said. Mr. Dunnam said he had become even more concerned because of a federal appeals court case involving a criminal investigation, in which federal authorities had demanded that a company attach a wiretap to tracking services like those installed in his car. The suit did not reveal which company was involved. A three-judge panel in San Francisco rejected the request, but not on privacy grounds; the panel said the wiretap would interfere with the operation of the safety services. OnStar has said that its equipment was not involved in that case. An OnStar spokeswoman, Geri Lama, suggested that Mr. Dunnam’s worries were overblown. The signals that the company sends to unlock car doors or track location-based information can be triggered only with a secure exchange of specific identifying data, which ought to deter all but the most determined hackers, she said. The passage is written to ______.
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Few foods are more alluring than chocolate. "Chocolate is a drug of abuse in its own category," jokes Dr. Louis Aronne. "It’s ahnost as if people have chocolate receptors in their brains. " That may not be too far off the mark. In a recent book called "Breaking the Food Seduction," Dr. Neal Barnard contends that certain foods—including chocolate, cheese, red meat and practically anything combining sugar and fat—are just plain addictive. " It’s not that you lack willpower. These foods stimulate the release of chemicals in the brain’s pleasure center that keep you hooked. " Besides tapping the brain’s own "feel good" chemicals, Barnard says, some of these foods contain drug-like molecules (分子) of of their own. Cheese delivers casomorphins, the same compounds in a mother’s milk that help an infant bond during nursing, he says, but cheese is even more powerful, because it delivers casomorphins in an undiluted form. The result: "We’re bonding to our refrigerators. " Other scientists doubt these drug-like compounds have enough force to make the foods addictive. But no one denies that fat and sugar exert a strong appeal. The brain is designed to reward eating and other behaviors that promote survival. And throughout history, with food relatively hard to come by, what prmnoted survival better than calorie-dense foods packed with fat and sugar Besides, fat and sugar also calm the brain, lowering levels of stress hormones. "That’s why we call them comfort foods," says physiologist Mary Dallman. But comfort is different from addiction. In classic addiction, the brain grows less sensitive to a pleasurable substance, and the addict requires higher and higher doses to derive the same rewards. Can food cause that kind of change Perhaps. In a new study, Ann Kelley offered rats either plain water or a high-calorie chocolate drink. Over a two-week period, the animals drank more and more chocolate, but produced fewer brain opiates(镇静剂) in response. "You see the same thing in rats on morphine or heroin," she says. Admittedly, some foods can be hard to stop eating. But these foods are less habit-forming than alcohol—and most people can enjoy a drink without becoming alcoholic. The real problem today may be that we’re constantly surrounded with food—and can’t undo millions of years of evolution. The best title for the passage is ______.
Secretary: Hello, ______May I help you Caller: Yes, this is Jack Kordell. May I speak to Elaine Strong, please
According to new research of Prof. Randolf Menzel from the Free University in Berlin, the popular image of bees as the ultimate hard workers was inaccurate. "Although we see bees buzzing around tirelessly in spring and summer, the common belief in a bee’s busy nature is based on a misconception," he said. People only really see bees when they’re out flying, or they look at a colony of bees and see thousands of them buzzing around. They don’t get to pick them out as individuals. The professor, who this month won a German Zoological Society award for his work on bees, added that bees compensated for their apparent laziness with high intelligence, advanced memory skills and an ability to learn quickly. The suggestion that bees were not pulling their weight met with skepticism from British beekeepers. Glyn Davies, the President of the British Beekeepers Association, said that bees were not lazy but efficient. "At any particular stage in its life, a bee has a specific job to do. If they are unable to do that job, they conserve their energy by doing nothing. Each bee has a unit of life energy and the faster it works, the faster it dies. They are being very wise and perhaps humans should try to follow their example instead of running about like headless chickens. " The idea of the busy bee is several thousand years old. One current author who has nothing but admiration for the bee is Paul Theroux, the novelist and part-time beekeeper. "I have never seen a bee sleeping. My bees never stop working. " he said, Mr. Theroux, who keeps 85 hives each containing 30000 bees in Hawaii, added that Prof. Menzel’s research could have been affected by his national origins. "Perhaps in comparison to the German rate of work, the bee does look lazy," he said. Few people think that the busy bee idea will go away, despite the efforts of Prof. Menzel. It performs too many useful functions in our culture. In fact, the worship of hees seems to be undergoing a renaissance. IBM recently ran a series of ads drawing on the " waggle dance" of bees, telling businessmen to "make your business waggle. \ The IBM ads in the passage are used to ______.
A complex operation called spinal fusion has emerged as the treatment of choice for many kinds of back pain. But a number of researchers say there is little scientific evidence to show that for most patients, spinal fusion works any better than a simpler operation, the lamineetomy (椎板切除术). Some people would be better off with no surgery at all. Even doctors who favor fusions say that more research is needed on their benefits. In the absence of better data, critics point to a different reason for the fusion operation’s fast rise: money. Medicare can pay a surgeon as much as four times more for a spinal fusion as for a laminectomy. Hospitals also collect two to four times as much. "We all cave in to market and economic forces," said Dr. Edward C. Benzel. Though doctors, as a rule, should favor the least complicated treatment—with surgery being the last resort — Dr. Benzel estimated that fewer than half of the spinal fusions done today were probably appropriate. Doctors and hospitals are not the only players with a financial stake in fusion operations. Critics blame the companies that make the hardware for promoting more complex fusions without evidence that they are significantly more effective. Some sort of hardware is used in almost 90 percent of lower-back fusions and the national bill for the hardware alone has soared to $ 2.5 billion a year. The hardware makers acknowledge giving surgeons millions of dollars for consulting and researches, but say the money promotes technical and medical advances that improve back care. But a lawsuit brought by Scott A. Wiese, a former sales representative of Medtronic-the biggest maker of spinal hardware, accused the company of trying to persuade surgeons to use its products with offers of first-class plane tickets to Hawaii and nights at the finest hotels. Medtronic said it did nothing wrong, and it denied the accusations in the lawsuit. But the company disclosed earlier this year that the federal government was investigating charges that it paid illegal kickbacks to surgeons. Federal officials declined to comment on the investigation, and Medtronic said it would vigorously defend itself. Still, between the allure of money and the quest for breakthroughs in treatment, some prominent spinal surgeons say that back care has gone astray. It is implied that doctors ______.
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