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When the British artist Paul Day unveiled his nine metre-high bronze statue of two lovers locked in an embrace at London’s brand new St Pancreas International Station last year it was lambasted as "kitsch", "overblown" and "truly horrific". Now, a brief glimpse of a new frieze to wrap around a plinth for The Meeting Place statue has been revealed, depicting "dream-like" scenes inspired by the railways.Passengers arriving from the continent will be greeted with a series of images including a Tube train driven by a skeleton as a bearded drunk sways precariously close to the passing train Another shows the attempted suicide of a jilted lover under a train reflected in the sunglasses of a fellow passenger. Another section reveals a woman in short skirt with her legs wrapped round her lover while they wait for the next train.Other less controversial parts of the terracotta draft frieze depicts soldiers leaving on troop trains for the First World War and the evacuation of London’s underground network after the terror attacks of 7 July 2005.Until the unveiling of The Meeting Place last year, Day, who lives in France, was best known for the Battle of Britain memorial on Embankment. His new frieze looks set to be a return to the sort of crammed bronze montages that has made him so well known Day said he wanted the new plinth to act as the ying to the larger statue’s yang."For me this sculpture has always been about how our dreams collide with the real world," he said. "The couple kissing represent an ideal, a perfect dream reality that ultimately we cannot obtain. The same is true of the railways. They were a dream come true, an incredible feat of engineering but they also brought with them mechanized warfare, Blitzkrieg and death. "Day is still working on the final bronze frieze which will be wrapped around the bottom of the plinth in June next year but he says he wants the 50 million passengers that pass through St Pancras every year to be able to get up close and personal with the final product. "The statue is like a signpost to be seen and understood from far away," he said. "Its size is measured in terms of the station itself. The frieze, on the other hand, is intended to capture the gaze of passers-by and lead them on a short journey of reflections about travel and change that echoes their presence in St Pancras, adding a very different experience to The Meeting Place sculpture. "Brushing aside some of the criticism leveled at his work that has compared it to cartoons or comic strips, Day said he believed his work would stand the test of time. "All the crap that was hurled at the sculpture was just that, crap," he said "The reaction from the critics was so strangely hostile but I believe time will tell whether people, not the art press, will value the piece."When people criticise my reliefs for looking like comic strips they have got the wrong end of the stick. Throughout the ages, man has been telling stories through a series of pictures, whether it’s stained glass windows, sculptures or photojournalism. My friezes are part of that tradition "Stephen Jordan, from London and Continental Railways, which commissioned the piece, said: " The Meeting Place seeks to challenge and has been well received by visitors who love to photograph it. In addition, it performs an important role within the station, being visible from pretty much anywhere on the upper level of St Pancras International and doing exactly what was planned, making the perfect meeting place for friends. \ When Paul Day says "but they (the railways) also brought with then mechanized warfare, Blizkrieg and death" (para. 5), he means that （）
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Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following interview. 13（）
Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following talk. 18（）
Britain, somewhat proudly, has been crowned the most watched society in the world. The country boasts 4.2 million security cameras (one for every 14 people) , a number expected to double in the next decade. A typical Londoner makes an estimated 300 closed-circuit television (CCTV) appearances a day, according to the British nonprofit surveillance Studies Network, an average easily met in the short walk between Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament. Public opinion on this state of affairs is generally positive, according to recent polls. And how useful is CCTV in busting bad guys Not much, according to Scotland Yard. In terms of cost benefit, the enormous expenditure has done very little in actually preventing and solving crime.Right under Big Brother- s nose, a new class of guerrilla artists and hackers are comrnandeering the boring, grainy images of vacant parking lots and empty corridors for their own purposes. For about $ 80 at any electronics supply store and some technical know-how, it is possible to tap into London’s CCTV hotspots with a simple wireless receiver (sold with any home-security camera) and a battery to power it. Dubbed "video sniffing," the pastime evolved out of the days before broadband became widely available, when "war-chalkers" scouted the city for unsecured Wi-Fi networks and marked them with chalk using special symbols. Sniffing is catching on in other parts of Europe, spread by a small but globally connected community of practitioners. "It’s actually a really relaxing thing to do on a Sunday," says Joao Wilbert, a master’s student in interactive media, who slowly paces the streets in London like a treasure hunter, carefully watching a tiny handheld monitor for something to flicker onto the screen.The excursions pick up obscure, random shots from the upper corners of restaurants and hotel lobbies, or of a young couple shopping in a house wares department nearby. Eerily, baby cribs are the most common images. Wireless child monitors work on the same frequency as other surveillance systems, and are almost never encrypted or secured.Given that sniffing is illegal, some artists have found another way to obtain security footage: they ask for it, in a letter along with a check for ￡10. In making her film "Faceless," Austrian- born artist Manu Luksch made use of a little-known law, included within Britain- s Data Protection Act, requiring CCTV operators to release a copy of their footage upon the request of anyone captured on their cameras. "Within the maximum period of 40 days I received some recordings in my mail," says Luksch. "And I thought, Wow, that works well. Why not make a feature length, science-fiction love story" After four years of performing, staging large dance ensembles in public atriums and submitting the proper paperwork, Luksch produced a haunting, beautifully choreographed film and social commentary, in which the operators have blocked out each and every performer’s face, in compliance with Britain- s privacy laws."The Duelists," one of the more well known CCTV movies, was shot by filmmaker David Valentine entirely with the security cameras in a mall in Manchester. He was able to cajole his way into the control booth for the project, but he is also credited with having advanced video sniffing to an art form and social tool. He’s collaborated with MediaShed, an organization based in Southend- on-Sea just outside London that works with homeless youth, using sniffing as a way to gain their interest and re-engage them with society.In some cases video sniffing has morphed into a form of hacking, in which the sniffer does more than just watch. Using a transmitter strong enough to override the frequency that most cameras use, sniffers can hijack wireless networks and broadcast different images back to the security desk. Most sniffers, hijackers and artists using CCTV are critical of the present level of surveillance, but they’ re also interested in establishing a dialogue about what is typically a secretive arrangement. The ability to tap into wireless surveillance systems and take them over points out a flaw in the elaborate security apparatus that has evolved around us.As anthropologists tell us. the act of observation changes what’s being observed. Cameras "reorder the environment," says Graham Harwood, artistic director of the group Mongrel, which specializes in digital media. That’s especially true of saturated London. Like "flash mobs" and "wifipicning," both large, spontaneous gatherings of people centered around communications technology, sniffing and hijacking could become the next high-tech social phenomenon. Of course, it will likely disappear quickly once the surveillance industry catches on to the shenanigans and beefs up its security. But the cameras will remain* According to Scotland Yard, the surveillance apparatus established in Britain （）
From cyborg housemaids and water-powered cars to dog translators, and rocket boots, Japanese boffins have racked up plenty of near-misses in the quest to turn science fiction into reality. Now the finest scientific minds of Japan are devoting themselves to cracking the greatest sci-fi vision of all: the space elevator. Man has so far conquered space by painfully and inefficiently blasting himself out of the atmosphere but the 21st century should bring a more leisurely ride to the final frontier.For chemists, physicists, material scientists, astronauts and dreamers across the globe, the space elevator represents the most tantalizing of concepts: cables stronger and lighter than any fibre yet woven, tethered to the ground and disappearing beyond the atmosphere to a satellite docking station in geosynchronous orbit above Earth.Up and down the 22,000 mile-long (36,000km) cables-or flat ribbons-will run the elevator carriages, themselves requiring huge breakthroughs in engineering to which the biggest Japanese companies and universities have turned their collective attention.In the carriages, the scientists behind the idea told The Times , could be any number of cargoes. A space elevator could carry people, huge solar-powered generators or even casks of radioactive waste. The point is that breaking free of Earth-s gravity will no longer require so much energy- perhaps 100 times less than launching the space shuttle. "Just like traveling abroad, anyone will be able to ride the elevator into space," Shuichi Ono, chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association, saidThe vision has inspired scientists around the world and government organizations, including Nasa. Several competing space elevator projects are gathering pace as various groups vie to build practical carriages, tethers and the hundreds of other parts required to carry out the plan. There are prizes offered by space elevator-related scientific organizations for breakthroughs and competitions for the best and fastest design of carriage.First envisioned by the celebrated master of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1979 work The Fountains o f Paradise, the concept has all the best qualities of great science fiction: it is bold, it is a leap of imagination and it would change life as we know it. Unlike the warp drives in Star Trek, or H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the idea of the space elevator does not mess with the laws of science; it just presents a series of very, very complex engineering problems.Japan is increasingly confident that its sprawling academic and industrial base can solve those issues, and has even put the astonishingly low price tag of a trillion yen (￡5 billion) on building the elevator. Japan is renowned as a global leader in the precision engineering and high-quality material production without which the idea could never be possible.The biggest obstacle lies in the cables. To extend the elevator to a stationary satellite from the Earth’s surface world require twice that length of cable to reach a counterweight, ensuring that the cable maintains its tension. The cable must be exceptionally light, staggeringly strong and able to withstand all projectiles thrown at it inside and outside the atmosphere. The answer, according to the groups working on designs, will lie in carbon nanotubes-microscopic particles that can be formed into fibres and whose mass production is now a focus of Japan’s big textile companies.According to Yoshio Aoki, a professor of precision machinery engineering at Nihon University and a director of the Japan Space Elevator Association, the cable would need to be about four times stronger than what is currently the strongest carbon nanotube fibre, or about 180 times stronger than steel. Pioneering work on carbon nanotubes in Cambridge has produced a strength improvement of about 100 times over the past five years.Equally, there is the issue of powering the carriages as they climb into space. "We are thinking of using the technology employed in our bullet trains," Professor Aoki said. "Carbon nanotubes are good conductors of electricity, so we are thinking of having a second cable to provide power all along the route. " Japan is hosting an international conference in November to draw up a timetable for the machine. According to the passage, the idea of the space elevator（）
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