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Last week 8,400 British students about to enter university received an e-mail from the Student Loans Company (SLC), a government body, reminding them to complete their application forms. It came with an attachment that listed all 8,400 e-mail addresses. The outfit later issued a sheepish apology and promised an "internal investigation". At best, such data breaches make a small dent in a firm"s reputation and the whole thing blows over, as it did SLC"s case; at worst, though, companies lose the trust of their customers and also have to pay large frees. Sony, an ailing Japanese electronics giant, may never quite recover from breach last year, when hackers stole the personal details of over 100m customers.The explosion of data in recent years was always going to make data breaches more common, as two recent reports make clear. The first is an annual publication commissioned by Symantec, a maker of security software, and carried out by the Ponemon Institute, a data-protection researcher, to look into the cost of data breaches in several countries. Now in its seventh year, the report had some good news for Americans. Calculating the costs of investigations, compensation, customer support and projected loss of revenue, it found that the average cost to a company per breached record declined for the first time since the numbers are tracked. The figure dropped from $214 in 2010 to $194 in 2011, suggesting that companies had become better both at preventing and responding to breaches.Europeans fared less well. The cost rose from ￡71 to ￡79 ($113 to $126) in Britain, from€98 to€122 ($130 to $162) in France and from€138 to€146 in privacy-conscious Germany. In all four countries, around two-thirds of all breaches were the result of technical faults and malicious attacks. But the remaining third was down to negligence. They could, in other words, never have happened.The second study goes some way to explaining why they did. Iron Mountain, a data-management company, commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy, to assess the risk of information loss faced by mid-size European companies based on their attitudes to managing data. The report looks at 600 businesses in six European countries across different sectors. It found that businesses tend to regard data protection issues as the responsibility of IT departments. More than haft thought that technology can solve the problem. Only 1% of the businesses surveyed believed it concerned all employees—and thus required a change in behavior.Both reports conclude that is precisely what is needed. Symantec"s study found a correlation between having a senior executive in charge of information security and lower costs of data breaches. "It has to start at the top," says Marc Duale, Iron Mountain"s head. The best solution need not be the most expensive—employee-awareness programs and staff training can be more effective than pricey IT upgrades. Malicious attacks may be unavoidable but silly mistakes are unforgivable. From the last paragraph, we know that the best way to improve data protection performance, companies should ______.
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As one of a rare group of economists who believe that "manufacturing matters" for the health of the American economy, I was heartened to hear President Obama emphasize manufacturing in his State of the Union address. During the last two years, the manufacturing sector has led the economic recovery, expanding by about 10 percent and adding more than 300,000 jobs. Though there are economists who do not share my view, I believe that a strong manufacturing sector matters for several reasons.First, economists agree that the United States must rebalance growth away from consumption and imports financed by foreign borrowing toward exports. Manufactured goods account for about 86 percent of merchandise exports from the United States and about 60 percent of exports of goods and services combined. American manufacturing exports are becoming more attractive as a result of rising wages abroad, the decline in the dollar"s value, increasing supply-chain coordination and transportation costs, and strong productivity growth in American manufacturing.Germany and Japan, two high-wage countries, have maintained substantial shares of manufacturing in their economies, and are major exporters of manufactured goods to emerging market economies. Like manufacturing in these countries, manufacturing in the United States can win larger shares of global export markets with the right policies in place.Second, on average manufacturing jobs are high-productivity, high value-added jobs with good pay and benefits. In 2009, the average manufacturing worker earned $74,447 in annual pay and benefits compared with $63,122 for the average non-manufacturing worker. In that year, only about 9 percent of the work force was employed in manufacturing, down from about 13 percent in 2000. The fall in manufacturing employment during the 2000s was a major factor behind growing wage inequality and the polarization of job opportunities between the top and bottom of the wage and skill distribution, with a hollowing out of middle-income jobs.Third, manufacturing matters because of its substantial role in innovation. American leadership in science and technology remains highly dependent on R. & D. investment by manufacturing companies, and the social returns to such investment are substantial, far exceeding the returns to the companies that fund it.American multinational companies that account for about 84 percent of all private-sector business R. & D. in the United States still place about 84 percent of their R. & D. activities in the United States, often in clusters around research universities. But this share is gradually declining as American companies shift some of their R. & D. to Asia in response to rapidly growing markets, ample supplies of technical workers and engineers and generous subsidies. Congress"s failure to extend and broaden the R. & D. tax credit, as President Obama has urged, is also encouraging companies in the United States to look to other countries offering far more generous R. & D. tax incentives. It can be inferred from the passage that manufacturing jobs play an important part in ______.
At work, as in life, attractive women get a lot of good lucks. Studies have shown that they are more likely to be 1 than their plain-Jane colleagues because people tend to project 2 traits 3 them, such as a sensitive heart and a cool head, they may also be at a/an 4 in job interviews. But research suggests otherwise.Brad Hanks at Georgia State University looked at what happens when job hunters include photos with their resume, as is the 5 in much of Europe and Asia. The pair sent made-up applications to over 2,500 real-life 6 . For each job, they sent two very similar resume, one with a photo, one without. Subjects had previously been graded for their attractiveness.For men, the results were 7 expected. Hunks were more likely to be called for an interview if they included a photo. Ugly men were better off not including one. However, for women this was 8 Attractive females were less likely to be offered an interview if they included a mugshot. When applying directly to a company (rather than through an agency) an attractive woman would need to send out 11 CVs on average 9 getting an interview; a/an 10 qualified plain one just seven.At first, Mr. Hanks considered 11 he calls the "dumb-blonde hypothesis"—that people 12 beautiful women to be stupid. 13 , the photos had also been rated on how 14 people thought each subject looked; there was no 15 between perceived intellect and beauty.So the cause of the discrimination must 16 elsewhere. Human resources departments tend to be 17 mostly by women. Indeed, in the Israeli study, 93% of those tasked with selecting whom to invite for an interview were female. The researchers" unavoidable—and unpalatable—conclusion is that old-fashioned 18 led the women to discriminate 19 pretty candidates.So should attractive women simply attach photos that make them look dowdy No. Better, says Mr. Hanks, to discourage the practice of including a photo altogether. Companies might even consider the 20 model used in the Belgian public sector, where CVs do not even include the candidate"s name.
As one of a rare group of economists who believe that "manufacturing matters" for the health of the American economy, I was heartened to hear President Obama emphasize manufacturing in his State of the Union address. During the last two years, the manufacturing sector has led the economic recovery, expanding by about 10 percent and adding more than 300,000 jobs. Though there are economists who do not share my view, I believe that a strong manufacturing sector matters for several reasons.First, economists agree that the United States must rebalance growth away from consumption and imports financed by foreign borrowing toward exports. Manufactured goods account for about 86 percent of merchandise exports from the United States and about 60 percent of exports of goods and services combined. American manufacturing exports are becoming more attractive as a result of rising wages abroad, the decline in the dollar"s value, increasing supply-chain coordination and transportation costs, and strong productivity growth in American manufacturing.Germany and Japan, two high-wage countries, have maintained substantial shares of manufacturing in their economies, and are major exporters of manufactured goods to emerging market economies. Like manufacturing in these countries, manufacturing in the United States can win larger shares of global export markets with the right policies in place.Second, on average manufacturing jobs are high-productivity, high value-added jobs with good pay and benefits. In 2009, the average manufacturing worker earned $74,447 in annual pay and benefits compared with $63,122 for the average non-manufacturing worker. In that year, only about 9 percent of the work force was employed in manufacturing, down from about 13 percent in 2000. The fall in manufacturing employment during the 2000s was a major factor behind growing wage inequality and the polarization of job opportunities between the top and bottom of the wage and skill distribution, with a hollowing out of middle-income jobs.Third, manufacturing matters because of its substantial role in innovation. American leadership in science and technology remains highly dependent on R. & D. investment by manufacturing companies, and the social returns to such investment are substantial, far exceeding the returns to the companies that fund it.American multinational companies that account for about 84 percent of all private-sector business R. & D. in the United States still place about 84 percent of their R. & D. activities in the United States, often in clusters around research universities. But this share is gradually declining as American companies shift some of their R. & D. to Asia in response to rapidly growing markets, ample supplies of technical workers and engineers and generous subsidies. Congress"s failure to extend and broaden the R. & D. tax credit, as President Obama has urged, is also encouraging companies in the United States to look to other countries offering far more generous R. & D. tax incentives. In Paragraph 4, the author is mainly discussing ______.
Like a lot of carless New Yorkers, I am generally confused by bursts of populist outrage over high gas prices. But I have always assumed that the anger is genuine. But amid the recent mania over prices hitting $4 a gallon, I decided to figure out whether this fury is economically rational. So I took a look at data from the Census Bureau, which conducts a quarterly survey of American spending habits. During these last few years of historically high oil prices, Americans spent about $40 a week, or $2,000 a year, on gas. That"s around 5 percent of our overall spending. It"s less than half of what we spend on restaurants and entertainment.High gas prices must be forcing Americans to cut back in other ways, right That"s what the economist Lutz Kilian at the University of Michigan wondered. He looked at personal spending habits during periods of high energy prices and discovered that "somewhat surprisingly, there is no significant decline in total expenditures on recreation," which was one place they expected to find frugality. In other words, Americans may protest loudly, but their economic behavior indicates a remarkable indifference to the price of oil.While sustained high gas prices would certainly produce some turmoil, so would potential spikes in countless other globally traded commodities. But there"s a reason populist outcries don"t start around soybean prices or magnesium spikes. Oil is the only volatile commodity that most Americans deal with directly: we are buffered from most other price swings by our relative wealth. Unlike people in poor countries, consumers here don"t generally buy raw commodity foods; we buy our meals processed or prepared. With most goods, the commodity price has even less impact on cost. "When people buy a phone," Kilian says, "they don"t buy the copper that makes the wiring."With gas, though, hurtling prices are unavoidable. Every day, U. S. drivers pay a price determined by forces all over the world that are hard to understand and harder for the United States to control. Even if we invested in better refineries and exploited every possible energy source, from the Keystone pipeline to the Alaskan wilderness, the impact could be minimal. It could eventually lower prices at the pump—but only if nothing else affects them, like OPEC lowering its production to drive prices back up again. The price of oil is, of course, affected by hundreds of interrelated factors.Many analysts I"ve spoken with suggest that oil prices should fall fairly soon. This will be welcome news to the less-fortunate American families who are notimperviousto the price at the pump and to anyone who claims to be pinching pennies because of gas. But as unpopular as it may sound, the best possible future for most Americans may involve much higher gas prices. As billions of people, throughout the world, enter the middle class in the coming decades, there will be an enormous increase in the demand for gas. This, along with rising environmental considerations, is likely to send the prices far higher than they are today. It can beinferred from Paragraph 4 that ______.
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