I was really glad when your club invited me to share my coin collection. It’s been my passion since I collected my first Lincoln cent in 1971. That is the current penny with Abraham Lincoln’s image. Just a little history before I started my own collection. Lincoln pennies are made of copper and they were the first the United States coins to bear the likeness of the president. It was back in 1909 when the country was celebrating the centennial of Lincoln’s birth than 1809 that the decision was made to redesign the one-cent piece in his honor. Before that, the penny had an American Indian head on it. The new penny was designed by artist Victor David Braner. This is interesting because he put his initials VDB on the reverse of the coin as the original design. There was a general uproar when the initials were discovered. And only a limited number of coins were struck with the initials on them. Today a penny with the initials from a San Francisco mint called the 1909s’ VDB is worth over 500 dollars. Now when I started my coin collection, I began with penny for several reasons. There were a lot of them, several hundred billion were minted and there were a lot of people collecting them. So I have plenty of people to trade with and talk to about my collection. Also it was the coin I could afford to collect as a young teenager. In the twenty-five years since then, I have managed to acquire over three hundred coins; some of them are very rare. I will be sharing with you today some of my rare specimen including the 1909s’ VDB.

Today I want to talk to you about wasps and their nests. You’ll recall the biologist divide species of wasps into two groups: solitary and social. Solitary wasps as the name implies do not live together with other wasps. In most species the male and female get together only to mate and then the female does all the work of building the nest and providing the food for the offspring by herself. Solitary wasps usually make nests in the ground and they separate the chambers for the individual offspring with bits of grass, stone or mud, whatever is handy. What about social wasps? They form a community and work together to build and maintain the nest. A nest begins in the spring when the fertile female called the queen builds the first few compartments in the nest and lay eggs. The first offspring are small females but cannot lay eggs. These females called workers. They build a lot of new compartments and the queen lays more eggs. They also care for the new offspring and defend the nest with their stingers. By the way only the female wasps have stingers. Most social wasps make nest of paper. The female produces the paper by chewing up plant fibers or old wood. They spread the papers in thin layers to make cells, in which the queen lays her eggs. Most of you I’m sure have seen these nests suspended from trees. They may also be built under the ground in abandoned rodent burrows.  J'

One of the most popular myths about the United States in the 19th Century was that of the free and simple life of the farmer. It was said that the farmers worked hard on their own land to produce whatever their families’ needed. They might sometimes trade with their neighbors, but in general they could get along just fine by relying on themselves, not on commercial ties with others. This is how Thomas Jefferson idealized the farmer at the beginning of the 19th century. And at that time, this may have been close to the truth especially on the frontier. But by the mid century sweeping changes in agriculture were well under way as farmers began to specialize in the raising of crops such as cotton or corn or wheat. By late in the century revolutionary advances in farm machinery has vastly increased production of specialized crops and extensive network of railroads had linked farmers throughout the country to markets in the east and even overseas. By raising and selling specialized crops, farmers could afford more and finer goods and achieved a much higher standard of living but at a price. Now farmers were no longer dependent just on the weather and their own efforts, their lives were increasing controlled by banks, which had powder to grant or deny loans for new machinery, and by the railroads which set the rates for shipping their crops to market. As businessmen, farmers now had to worry about national economic depressions and the influence of world supply and demand on, for example, the price of wheat in Kansas. And so by the end of the 19th century, the era of Jefferson’s independent farmer had come to a close.

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加油，朝着前方勇敢的走下去

Stan, do you have a minute? Oh, hi, Cathy. Sure. What’s up? Well. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the situation in the office. I’m not in there very often. It’s so noisy that I can’t work. That’s exactly what I’m getting at. We’re supposed to be able to do our preparation and marking in that office, but have you noticed? Jack constantly has students coming in to get help with his course. A lot of people are going in and out. Has anybody spoken to him about it? No, not yet, but someone’s going to have to. We can’t really ask him to stop having students come in for help, can we? No, of course not. But I’m not able to do my work and neither are you. I imagine it’s the same for the others in the office. Hmmm, could we ask for a kind of meeting room? When TA’s have to talk with student, they could go to the meeting room and not use the office. You know, there’s a room down the hall, a rather small room, that we could ask to use. It’s only for storing supplies.You mean that little storage room? Oh, that would be too small. Are you sure? With the cabinets taken out, it might be bigger than it looks. Come to think of it, you may be on to something. I’d like to have a look at that room. Can we go there now? Sure. Let’s go.

I really appreciate your filling me in on yesterday’s lecture.小No problem. I thought you might want to go over it together. And, anyway, it helps me review. Hope you’re feeling better now. I am. Thanks. So, you said she talked about squid? Sounds a little strange.Well, actually, it was about the evolution of sea life—a continuation from last week. The octopus and the squid descended from earlier creatures with shells. They survived by shedding their shells—somewhere between 200 and 500 million years ago. That’s a pretty long span of time. I know. That’s what she said, though. To be precise: “Exactly when they emerged is uncertain and why is still unexplained.” Some squid are really huge. Can you imagine something that big if it still had a shell? Actually, it’s because they lost their shells that they could evolve to a bigger size. Makes sense. But some are really huge. I’ve read about fishermen that caught squid that weighed over a ton. Did she talk about how that happens? TONot really. But she did mention some unusual cases. In 1933 in New Zealand they caught a squid…let’s see here…it was twenty-two yards long. Its eyes were eighteen inches across. Can you imagine? Reminds me of all those stories of sea monsters. Dr. Simpson thinks there are probably even larger ones that haven’t been found because squid are intelligent and fast—so they can easily get away from humans. Maybe some of those monster stories are true.
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[ 本帖最后由 icenot 于 2008-3-29 23:44 编辑 ]

Community service is an important component of education here at our university. We encourage all students to volunteer for at least one community activity before they graduate. A new community program called “One On One” helps elementary students who’ve fallen behind. You education majors might be especially interested in it because it offers the opportunity to do some teaching—that is, tutoring in math and English. You’d have to volunteer two hours a week for one semester. You can choose to help a child with math, English, or both. Half-hour lessons are fine, so you could do a half hour of each subject two days a week. Professor Dodge will act as a mentor to the tutors—he’ll be available to help you with lesson plans or to offer suggestions for activities. He has office hours every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. You can sign up for the program with him and begin the tutoring next week. I’m sure you’ll enjoy this community service and you’ll gain valuable experience at the same time. It looks good on your resume too—showing that you’ve had experience with children and that you care about your community. If you’d like to sign up, or if you have any questions, stop by Professor Dodge’s office this week.

I hope you’ve all finished reading the assigned chapter on insurance—so that you’re prepared for our discussion today. But, before we start. I’d like to mention a few things your text doesn’t go into. It’s interesting to note that insurance has existed in some form for a very long time. The earliest insurance policies were what were called bottomry contracts. They provided shipping protection for merchants as far back as 3000 B.C. In general, the contracts were often no more than verbal agreements. They granted loans to merchants with the understanding that if a particular shipment of goods was lost at sea, the loan didn’t have to be repaid. Interest on the loans varied according to how risky it was to transport the goods. During periods of heavy piracy at sea, for example, the amount of interest and the cost of the policy went up considerably. So, you can see how insurance helped encourage international trade. Even the most cautious merchants became willing to risk shipping their goods over long distances—not to mention in hazardous weather conditions—when they had this kind of protection available. Generally speaking, the basic form of an insurance policy has been pretty much the same since the Middle Ages. There are four points that were salient then and remain paramount in all policies today. These were outlined in chapter six and will serve as the basis for the rest of today’s discussion. Can anyone tell me what one of those points might be?

Located at the NASA Research Center in Iowa is a 5,000 gallon vat of water, and inside the tank is an underwater treadmill designed by Dava Newman, an aerospace engineer. For four years Newman observed scuba divers as they simulated walking on the Moon and on Mars on her underwater moving bell. She wanted to discover how the gravity of the Moon and of Mars would affect human movement. To do this, Newman attached weights to the divers and then lowered them into the tank and onto the treadmill. These weights were carefully adjusted so that the divers could experience the underwater gravity of the Moon and of Mars as they walked on the treadmill. Newman concluded that walking on Mars will probably be easier than walking on the Moon. The Moon has less gravity than Mars does. so at lunar gravity, the divers struggled to keep their balance and walked awkwardly. But at Martian gravity the divers had grater traction and stability and could easily adjust to a pace of 1.5 miles per hour. As Newman gradually increased the speed of the treadmill, the divers took longer, graceful strides until they comfortably settled into an even quicker pace. Newman also noted that at Martian gravity, the divers needed less oxygen.The data Newman collected will help in the future design of Martian space suits. Compared to lunar space suits, Martian space suits will require smaller air tanks and to allow for freer movement; the elbow and knee areas of the space suits will also be altered.