In the last paragraph, "lost its bearings" may mean ______.
A. become impatient
B. failed to find the right position
C. lost its foundation
D. grown band-mannered
Why does the author mention a dog's bark? ______
A. To exemplify poor memory.
B. To analyze a type of interruption.
C. To compare human memory with dog's memory.
D. To illustrate the lack of efficiency of rote rehearsal.
Computers monitor everything in Singapore from soil composition to location of manholes. At the airport, it took just 15 seconds for the computerized immigration system to scan and approve my passport. It takes only one minute to be checked into a public hospital.
By 1998, almost every household will be wired for interactive cable TV and the Internet, the global computer network. Shoppers will be able to view and pay for products electronically. A 24- hour community telecomputing network will allow users to communicate with elected representatives and retrieve information about government services. It is all part of the government's plan to transform. the nation into what it calls the "Intelligent Island".
In so many ways, Singapore has elevated the concept of efficiency to a kind of national ideology. For the past ten years, Singapore's work force was rated the best in the world--ahead of Japan and the U. S. --in terms of productivity, skill and attitude by the Business Environment Risk Intelligence service.
Behind the "Singapore miracle" is a man Richard Nixon described as one of "the ablest leaders I have met," one who, "in other times and other places, might have attained the world stature of a Churchill. " Lee Kuan Yew led Singapore's struggle for independence in the 1950s, serving as Prime Minister from 1959 until 1990. Today (1995), at 71, he has nominally retired to the office of Senior Minister, where he continues to influence his country's future. Lee offered companies tax breaks, political stability, cheap labor and strike-free environment.
Nearly 90 percent of Singaporean adults now own their own homes and thanks to strict adherence to the principle of merit, personal opportunities abound. "If you've got talent and work hard, you can be anything here," says a Malaysian-born woman who holds a high-level civil-service position.
Lee likes to boast that Singapore has avoided the "moral breakdown" of Western countries. He attributes his nation's success to strong family ties, a reliance on education as the engine of advancement and social philosophy that he claims is superior to America's.
In an interview with Reader's Digest, he said that the United States has "lost its bearings" by emphasizing individual rights at the expense of society. "An ethical society," he said, "is one which matches human rights with responsibilities. "
What characterizes Singapore's advancement is its ______.
A. computer monitoring
B. work efficiency
C. high productivity
D. value on ethics
In the 1950s, the pioneers of artificial intelligence (AI) predicted that, by the end of this century, computers would be conversing with us at work and robots would be performing our housework. But as useful as computers are, they're nowhere close to achieving anything remotely resembling these early aspirations for humanlike behavior. Never mind something as complex as conversation: the most powerful computers struggle to reliably recognize the shape of an object, the most elementary of tasks for a ten-month-old kid.
A growing group of AI researchers think they know where the field went wrong. The problem, the scientists say, is that AI has been trying to separate the highest, most abstract levels of thought, like language and mathematics, and to duplicate them with logical, step-by-step programs. A new movement in AI, on the other hand, takes a closer look at the more roundabout way in which nature came up with intelligence. Many of these researchers study evolution and natural adaptation instead of formal logic and conventional computer programs. Rather than digital computers and transistors, some want to work with brain cells and proteins. The results of these early efforts are as promising as they are peculiar, and the new nature-based AI movement is slowly but surely moving to the forefront of the field.
Imitating the brain's neural network is a huge step in the right direction, says computer scientist and biophysicist Michael Conrad, but it still misses an important aspect of natural intelligence. "People tend to treat the brain as if it were made up of color-coded transistors", he explains, "but it's not simply a clever network of switches. There are lots of important things going on inside the brain cells themselves. " Specifically, Conrad believes that many of the brain's capabilities stem from the pattern recognition proficiency of the individual molecules that make up each brain cell. The best way to build an artificially intelligent device, he claims, would be to build it around the same sort of molecular skills.
Right now, the option that conventional computers and software are fundamentally incapable of matching the processes that take place in the brain remains controversial. But if it proves true, then the efforts of Conrad and his fellow AI rebels could turn out to be the only game in town.
The author says that the powerful computers of today ______.
A. are capable of reliably recognizing the shape of an object
B. are close to exhibiting humanlike behavior
C. are not very different in their performance from those of the 50's
D. still cannot communicate with people in a human language