Together with the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Cambridge University Library and Trinity College's library in Dublin, the British Library is now empowered to receive a copy of every U.K. electronic publication. This is a logical enough extension in the digital age of its ancient right to receive and store all books, newspapers, magazines and other printed matter, but it is still a challenging task.

The first full-scale Internet “crawl” was launched from the library’s West Yorkshire computer center shortly after the law took effect. Covering 4.8 million U.K. sites, it took three months to complete, with another two months required to process the 1 billion captured web pages. The expectation is that the library will collect in a single year about the same amount of material as its newspaper and periodicals archive has amassed over the course of three centuries (a costly program to digitize some 40 million of its 750 million printed pages is now underway).

Chief Executive Rolv Keating points out that when the initial crawl began, the project represented a reassertion of what it means to be a library in the 21st century. Ten years ago, there was a very real danger of a black hole opening up and swallowing our digital heritage." Keating says. "Millions of web pages, e-publications and other nonprint items were falling through the cracks of a system devised primarily to capture ink and paper.'

Professor Niels Brugger, the head of the Center for Internet Studies at Denmark’s Aarhus University, supports the British Library’s archiving project. “More and more of our societal, cultural and political actives now take place either on the web or are closely related to it” he says. “Since the mid-1990s, you simply cou ldn’t be a university, a company or a political party without having a website. If want to document our present or study our past on the web, get it into an archive before it disappears.”

“Whenever I’m asked why web archiving matters,” he continues, “I thi nk of the Bob Dylan line from The Times They Are Changing —'The present now will later be past. ‘Material is disappearing before our eyes at an unprecedented rate, and with it goes precious source material for the future historian who will be trying to shed light on the present. Capturing the past for posterity through web archiving matters just as much as preserving other aspects of our cultural heritage, whether it’s kitchen utensils, buildings, warships or collections of newspapers. Studies suggest that 40 percent of what's on it at any given moment is deleted a year later, while another 40 percent has been altered, leaving just 20 percent of the original content.”

Almost every major national library in Europe now undertakes web arching. Though the scale and cost of such operations vary widely according to their individual remit. The British Libra ry’s project cost some $5 million to set up, the money coming entirely from its grant from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

现在，大英图书馆与苏格兰和威尔士国家图书馆、牛津大学的博德利图书馆、剑桥大学图书馆和都柏林三一学院图书馆一起，有权接收英国所有电子出版物的副本。在数字时代，这是一个合乎逻辑的延伸，因为它拥有接收和储存所有书籍、报纸、杂志和其他印刷品的古老权利，但这仍然是一项具有挑战性的任务。

该法律生效后不久，图书馆西约克郡计算机中心启动了第一个全面的互联网“爬行”。它覆盖了480万个英国网站，花了3个月的时间才完成，另外两个月需要处理10亿个被捕获的网页。人们预计，该图书馆在一年内收集的资料量，将与它的报纸和期刊档案馆在过去三个世纪积累的资料量相当(一项耗资巨大的计划正在进行，将其7.5亿页印刷资料中的4000万页数字化)。

图书馆首席执行官罗尔夫·基廷(Rolv Keating)指出，最初的爬行开始时，这个项目代表着对

图书馆在21世纪意义的重申。十年前，我们面临着一个非常现实的危险:一个黑洞正在打开，吞噬我们的数字遗产。基廷说。“数以百万计的网页、电子出版物和其他非印刷品从一个主要用于捕捉墨水和纸张的系统的缝隙中滑落。”

丹麦奥尔胡斯大学(Aarhus University)互联网研究中心(Center for Internet Studies)主任尼尔斯·布鲁格(Niels Brugger)教授支持大英图书馆的存档项目。他表示:“我们越来越多的社会、文化和政治活动要么发生在网络上，要么与之密切相关。”“自上世纪90年代中期以来，如果没有网站，你就不可能成为一所大学、一家公司或一个政党。”如果你想在网上记录我们的现在或者研究我们的过去，在它消失之前把它归档。

“每当有人问我为什么网络档案很重要时，”他继续说，“我就会想起鲍勃?迪伦(Bob Dylan)在他们正在改变的时代说过的话——‘现在的现在以后会成为过去。’”“材料正以前所未有的速度消失在我们的眼前，对于未来的历史学家来说，这些珍贵的原始材料也将随之消失，而未来的历史学家将试图揭示当下的真相。”通过网络档案为我们的子孙后代捕捉过去，就像保护我们文化遗产的其他方面一样重要，无论是厨房用具、建筑、军舰还是报纸收藏。研究表明，在任何一个特定的时刻，40%的内容会在一年后被删除，而另外40%的内容会被修改，只剩下20%的原始内容。

现在欧洲几乎每一个主要的国家图书馆都承担着网络拱架的工作。尽管这些行动的规模和费用因其各自的职责而有很大差别。大英图书馆的这个项目耗资约500万美元，资金全部来自文化、媒体和体育部的拨款。

If you're on Facebook, there's a roughly 0.04 percent chance the social media giant used you for a psychology- experiment in early 2012, though you'd have had no way of knowing at the time and indeed would only be finding out about the experiment this week.

That's what happened when researchers used nearly 700,000 Facebook users as guinea pigs for a study on “emotional contagion.” In brief, the study separated its users into two groups. One was subjected to a newsfeed of primarily positive posts; the other was flooded with emotionally negative items.

The results "suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks,' 1 the researchers write in a paper now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. In other words, the study confirmed what heavy Facebook users have long known to be true: what your friends post on Facebook can have a tangible impact on your own emotional state.

Facebook hasn’t been able to manipulate the reactions of users who have learned about the study's existence: people are vexed. Over the weekend, observers blasted the experiment as scandalous and disturbing, and according to The Guardian, one British MP has gone so far as to call for a parliamentary investigation into how it was carried out.

Adam Kramer, Facebook's data scientist and a coauthor of the study, took to his own Facebook page to offer a defense.

“The goal of all of our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service,” Kramer writes. “Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone.” Still, he goes on to conced e that those aims weren’t made particularly clear and that the research conclusions “may not have justified all of this anxiety.” That’s probably an understatement.

Most disturbing, though, is the fact that this sort of data manipulation is almost certainly within the bounds of Facebook’s Terms of Use. As The Verge points out, every Facebook user consents to their information being used for “internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”

Bu t Facebook doesn’t need to round up another half million study participants to confirm that virtually no one actually reads the Terms of Use.

如果你在Facebook上，这家社交媒体巨头在2012年初利用你做心理实验的几率约为0.04%，尽管当时你根本无从得知，实际上只是在本周才会知道这个实验。

当研究人员用将近70万Facebook用户作为“情绪感染”研究的小白鼠时，就发生了这种情况。简而言之，这项研究将使用者分为两组。其中一篇文章主要是正面的;另一组则充满了负面情绪。

研究人员在一篇发表在《美国国家科学院院刊》(Proceedings of The National Academy of Science)上的论文中写道，研究结果“表明，朋友通过在线社交网络表达的情绪会影响我们自己的情绪，据我们所知，这是社交网络大规模情绪感染的首个实验证据。”换句话说，这项研究证实了Facebook重度用户早就知道的事实:你的朋友在Facebook上发布的内容可以对你自己的情绪状态产生切实的影响。

Facebook一直无法控制了解到这项研究存在的用户的反应:人们很恼火。上周末，观察家们抨击这一实验是可耻和令人不安的。据《卫报》报道，一名英国议员甚至要求议会调查这一实验是如何进行的。

Facebook的数据科学家、这项研究的合著者亚当?克莱默(Adam Kramer)在自己的Facebook 页面上为自己辩护。

克雷默写道:“我们在Facebook进行的所有研究的目标都是学习如何提供更好的服务。”“我自己编写并设计了这个实验，我可以告诉你，我们的目标是永远不让任何人失望。”不过，他也承认，这些目标并没有特别明确，研究结论“可能无法证明所有这些焦虑都是合理的”。这可能是一个保守的说法。

然而，最令人不安的是，这种数据操纵几乎肯定在Facebook的使用条款范围内。正如The Verge所指出的，每个Facebook用户都同意他们的信息被用于“内部操作，包括故障排除、数据分析、测试、研究和服务改进”。

但Facebook不需要召集另外50万名研究参与者来确认实际上没有人真正阅读使用条款。

If you doubt that knowledge is power, consider the societies that have denied education to selected parts of the population. The Taliban m Afghanistan keeps women from having any power by outlawing their education, much as American society before the Civil War kept slaves from possessing power by denying their schooling. Institutions of higher learning continue to be among the best places for cultivating social change.

Besides, a college education is a legacy for your children. The idea of having children may be as remote as the international space station, but trust us, your college education will benefit your children —and not just so you can impress them with how well you play “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”Research shows that children of college-educated parents are healthier, perform better academically, and are more likely to attend college themselves than children of those with lower education attainment. Your education builds a foundation for your children 一for our nation's children, and for the children of our global community.

Education is the cornerstone of public progress. Education is the essence of the democratic ideals

that elevated the United States from a backward land of rebellious colonists to the greatest, most spirited, powerful and successful nation in the world. America leads the world in educational attainment. Speaking at a symposium on American values, Anne L. Heald said there is “an extraordinary consensus that the preparation of young people for work is one of the singular most important things a society can do to improve its ability to prosper in a new international economy.” Similarly, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan said, “We must ensure that our whole population receives an education that will allow full and continuing participation in this dynamic period of American economic history.”What Greenspan is saying is that, without college, you may be left out. And the relationship between a college education and success will become more and more significant in our information-driven global economy. Higher education will be increasingly important for landing high-paying jobs.

Technology and the information age are not the only reasons to be well educated; the trend is toward multiple jobs and even multiple careers, and higher education prepares you to make the transitions to new fields.

如果你怀疑知识就是力量，想想那些拒绝部分人接受教育的社会。阿富汗塔利班通过禁止妇女受教育来阻止她们拥有任何权力，就像美国社会在内战前通过拒绝奴隶受教育来阻止她们拥有权力一样。高等院校继续是培育社会变革的最佳场所之一。

此外，大学教育是你孩子的遗产。要孩子的想法可能与国际空间站一样遥远，但相信我们，你的大学教育将使你的孩子受益——而不仅仅是为了让他们知道你在《谁想成为百万富翁》中表现得多么出色。研究表明，父母受过大学教育的孩子比教育程度较低的孩子更健康，学习成绩更好，更有可能自己上大学。你的教育构建的基础为我们国家的孩子,你的孩子一为孩子们和我们的全球社区。

教育是社会进步的基石。教育是民主理想的精髓，正是这种民主理想把美国从一个充满反叛殖民者的落后国家提升为世界上最伟大、最勇敢、最强大和最成功的国家。美国在教育成就方面领先世界。希尔德(Anne L. Heald)在一个有关美国价值观的研讨会上发表讲话时说，“人们达成了一种不同寻常的共识，那就是，为年轻人就业做准备，是一个社会在新的国际经济中提高自身繁荣能力所能做的最重要的一件事情之一。”同样，美联储(Federal Reserve)主席艾伦?格林斯潘的意思是，没有大学，你可能会被排除在外。在信息驱动的全球经济中，大学教育与成功之间的关系将变得越来越重要。高等教育对于找到高薪工作将变得越来越重要。技术和信息时代不是受良好教育的唯一原因;现在的趋势是多份工作，甚至是多份职业，而高等教育为你进入新领域做好了准备。

Good grades and high test scores still matter a lot to many colleges as they award financial aid. But with low-income students projected to make up an ever-larger share of the college-bound population in the coming years, some schools are re-examining whether that aid, typically known as “merit aid”，is the most effective use of precious institutional dollars.

Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., says it will phase out merit scholarships altogether. No current merit-aid recipients will lose their scholarships, but need-based aid alone will be awarded beginning with students entering in the coming fall.

For small regional colleges that struggle just to fill seats, merit aid can be an important revenue-builder because many recipients still pay enough tuition dollars over and above the scholarship amount to keep the institution running. For ranking-conscious schools, merit-aid has served primarily as a tool to recruit top students and to improve their academic profits.

Studies show merit aid also tends to benefit disproportionately students who could afford to enroll without it. “As we look to the future, we see a more pressing need to invest in need-based aid,” says Monica Inzer, dean of admission and financial aid at Hamilton, which has offered merit scholarships for 10 years. During that time, it rose in U.S. News & World Report's ranking of the best liberal arts colleges, from 25 to 17.

Merit aid, which benefited about 75 students a year, or about 4% of its student body, at a cost of about $1 million a year, “served us well,” Inzer says, but “to be discounting the price for families that don’t need financial aid doesn’t feel right any more.”

Need-based aid remains by far the greatest share of all student aid, which includes state, federal and institutional grants. But merit aid, offered primarily by schools and states, is growing faster, both overall and at the institutional level. However, in recent years a growing chorus of critics has begun pressuring schools to drop the practice. Recent decisions by Hamilton and others may be “a sig n that people are starting to realize that there’s this destructive competition going on,” says Baum, a coauthor of a recent College Report that raises concerns about the role of institutional aid not based on need.

David Laird, president of the Minnesota Private College Council, says many of his schools would like to reduce their merit aid but fear that in doing so, they would lose top students to their competitors.

对许多大学来说，良好的成绩和高考试成绩仍然很重要，因为它们会提供经济资助。但由于低收入学生预计将占大学生总数的比例越来越大,未来几年,一些学校正在重新审视是否援助,通常被称为“奖学金”,是最有效的利用大学宝贵的资金。

纽约州克林顿的汉密尔顿学院(Hamilton College)该机构表示，将逐步取消奖学金。目前的奖学金受助人不会失去奖学金，但从明年秋季学生入学开始，将只发放基于需求的奖学金。对于那些努力填补空缺的小型地区性大学来说，奖学金可能是一个重要的创收来源，因为许多受助人支付的学费仍高于奖学金金额，足以维持学校的运转。对于注重排名的学校来说，“物有所值援助”主要是作为一种工具来招收优秀学生，并提高他们的学术利润。

研究表明，对于那些没有奖学金也能负担得起的学生来说，奖学金往往会给他们带来不成比例的好处。汉密尔顿大学(Hamilton)招生与经济援助系主任莫妮卡?因泽(Monica Inzer)表示:“展望未来，我们看到，在基于需求的援助方面投资的需求更为迫切。”汉密尔顿大学提供奖学金已有10年。在此期间，它在《美国新闻与世界报道》(U.S. News & World Report)的最佳文科院校排名中从25所上升到17所。

奖学金每年惠及75名学生，约占学生总数的4%，每年的成本约为100万美元。Inzer说，“它对我们很有帮助，但对那些不需要经济资助的家庭打折不再合适了。”

以需要为基础的援助仍然是所有学生援助中最大的份额，包括州、联邦和机构的资助。但是，主要由学校和各州提供的绩效援助，在总体和机构层面上都在以更快的速度增长。然而，近年来，越来越多的批评者开始向学校施压，要求它们放弃这种做法。汉密尔顿和其他人最近的决定可能是

Baum说:"有迹象表明人们开始意识到这种破坏性的竞争正在进行。

明尼苏达州私立大学理事会(Minnesota Private College Council)主席戴维?莱尔德(David Laird)表示，他的许多学校希望减少奖学金，但担心这样做会让优秀学生输给竞争对手。

Futurists have identified two changes that seem to be central to contemporary social life. First, the United States is being restructured from an industrial to an information society. Second,

modern societies are increasingly shifting from a national to a global economy. Futurists have applied a good many metaphors to these changes, including Daniel Bell’s “postindustrial society”，Alvin Toffler’s “the third wave”and John Naisbitt’s “megatrends' Common to these metaphors is the notion that American society is shifting from the production of goods to the production of services and from society based on the coordination of people and machines to a society organized around knowledge. These changes, it is contended, will afford a myriad of choices. The world will increasingly be one of many flavors, not just vanilla (香草）or chocolate. Many observers of contemporary American life believe that we are witnessing a historical change and the first major impact of the shift from an energy economy to an information economy. For 300 years technology has been cast in a mechanical model, one based on the combustion processes that go on inside a star like the sun. The steam engine opened the mechanical age, and it reached its peak with the discovery of nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, which replicated the energy producing processes of a star. We now seem to be moving toward a biological model based on information and involve the intensive use of materials. Although biological processes need physical energy and materials, they tend to substitute information for both. Biological processes “miniaturize “size, energy, and materials by “exploding” information. The human brain is some ten times the size and weight of the brain of a lemur ( 狐猴)，but it handles a billion times more information. As a result, high tech industries are information intensive rather than energy or material intensive.

Sociologists have played and will continue to play an important role in assessing and interpreting these developments and other aspects of change.

未来学家们已经确认了两个对当代社会生活至关重要的变化。首先，美国正在从工业社会向信息社会转型。第二，现代社会正日益从国家经济转向全球经济。未来学家有很多隐喻应用于这些变化,包括丹尼尔?贝尔的“后工业社会”,阿尔文?托夫勒的“第三次浪潮”和约翰·奈斯比特的“大趋势”这些隐喻普遍认为美国社会正在从生产商品的生产服务和社会协调的基础上人们社会围绕知识和机器。有人认为，这些变化将提供无数的选择。世界将越来越成为许多种之一,不仅香草(香草)或巧克力。

许多当代美国生活的观察家认为，我们正在目睹一个历史性的变化，以及从能源经济向信息经济转变的第一个重大影响。300年来，技术一直被铸造在一个机械模型中，一个基于恒星内部燃烧过程的模型，比如太阳。蒸汽机开启了机械时代，随着核裂变和核聚变的发现，蒸汽机达到了它的巅峰，这两项发现复制了恒星产生能量的过程。我们现在似乎正在走向一种基于信息的生物模型，并涉及到材料的密集使用。虽然生物过程需要物理能量和物质，但它们往往会用信息来代替这两者。生物过程通过“爆炸”信息“缩小”尺寸、能量和材料。人类的大脑是大脑的大小和重量的10倍的狐猴(狐猴),但它处理更多信息十亿倍。因此，高科技产业是信息密集型产业，而不是能源或材料密集型产业。

社会学家已经并将继续在评估和解释这些发展和变化的其他方面发挥重要作用。

Hunting for a job late last year, lawyer Gant Redmon stumbled across Career Builder, a job database on the Internet. He searched it with no success but was attracted by the site’s “personal search agent”. I t’s an interactive feature. That lets visitors key in job criteria such as location, title, and salary, then emails them when a matching position is posted in the database. Redmon chose the keywords legal, intellectual property, and Washington, D.C. Three weeks later, he got his first notification of an opening. “I struck gold, “says Redmon, who emailed his resume

to the employer and won a position as in-house counsel for a company. With thousands of career-related sites on the Internet, finding promising openings can be time consuming and inefficient. Search agents reduce the need for repeated visits to the databases. But although a search agent worked for Redmon, career experts see drawbacks. Narrowing your criteria, for example, may work against you. Every time you answer a question you eliminate a possibility, “says one expert.

For any job search, you should start with a narrow concept —what you think you want to do —then broaden it. “None of these programs do that,” say s another expert. “There’s no career counseling implicit in all of this.” Instead, the best strategy is to use the agent as a kind of tip service to keep abreast of jobs in a particular database; when you get an email, consider it a reminder to check the d atabase again. “I would not rely on agents for finding everything that is added to a database that might interest me,” says the author of a job-searching guide.

Some sites design their agents to tempt job hunters to return. When Career Site’s agent sends out messages to those who have signed up for its service, for example, it includes only three potential jobs —those it considers the best matches. There may be more matches in the database; job hunters will have to visit the site again to find them—and they do. “On the day after we send our messages, we see a sharp increase in our traffic, “says Seth Peets, vice president of marketing for Career Site.

Even those who aren’t hunting for jobs may find search agents worthwhile. Some use them to keep a close watch on the demand for their line of work or gather information on compensation to arm themselves when negotiating for a raise. Although happily employed, Redmon maintains his agent at Career Builder. “You always keep your eyes open,” he says. Working with a personal search means having another set of eyes looking out for you.

去年年底，律师甘特?雷蒙(Gant Redmon)在求职时偶然发现了网上求职数据库Career Builder。他搜索了该网站，但没有成功，而是被该网站的“个人搜索代理”所吸引。这是一个交互功能。这样，访问者就可以输入工作条件，比如工作地点、职位和薪水，然后当数据库中出现匹配的职位时，通过电子邮件通知他们。雷蒙选择了“法律”、“知识产权”和“华盛顿特区”这三个关键词。雷蒙说:“我找到了工作。在互联网上有成千上万个与职业相关的网站，寻找有前途的职位既费时又低效。搜索代理减少了对数据库的重复访问。但是，尽管一家搜索代理公司为雷蒙工作，职业专家们还是看到了它的缺点。例如，缩小你的标准可能对你不利。每次你回答一个问题，你就排除了一种可能性。

在找工作时，你应该从一个狭窄的概念开始——你认为你想做什么——然后拓宽它。另一位专家表示:“这些项目都没有做到这一点。”“所有这一切都不包含职业咨询。“相反，最好的策略是把中介当作一种提示服务，以便及时了解某一特定数据库中的工作情况;当你收到一封电子邮件时，把它当作再次检查数据库的提醒。一份求职指南的作者表示:“我不会依赖中介来查找添加到数据库中的所有可能令我感兴趣的信息。”

一些网站设计他们的中介来吸引求职者返回。例如，当Career Site的代理发送消息给那些注册了它的服务的人时，它只包含三个潜在的工作——那些它认为最适合的工作。数据库中可能有更多匹配项;求职者将不得不再次访问该网站才能找到他们——他们确实做到了。招聘网站营销副总裁赛斯?皮茨(Seth Peets)表示:“在我们发送信息的第二天，我们的流量就会大幅增加。”

即使是那些不找工作的人也会发现搜索代理是值得的。有些人利用它们来密切关注本行业的需求，或者收集有关薪酬的信息，以便在谈判加薪时有所准备。雷蒙虽然工作愉快，但仍在Career Builder公司担任经纪人。“你总是睁大眼睛，”他说。使用个人搜索意味着有另一双

眼睛在盯着你。