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Article 1

Genre: Science

The following article titled ‘Scientists Closing in on Black Hole at the Center of
Our Galaxy’, written by Clara Moskowitz, was published in Space.comin 2012.

Though scientists have suspected for a while that a giant black hole lurks
at the center of our galaxy, they still can't say for sure it's the explanation for the
strange behavior observed there. Now researchers are closer than ever to being
able to image this region and probe the physics at work – potentially shedding
light on the great conflict between the theories of general relativity and quantum
mechanics.

At the heart of the Milky Way, astronomers see some wacky things. For
example, about a dozen stars seem to be orbiting some invisible object. One star
has been found to make a 16-year orbit around the unseen thing, moving at the
hard-to-imagine speed of about 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers) a second. By
comparison, the sun moves through space at a comparatively glacial 137 miles
(220 kilometers) a second.
Based on the laws of motion, these dozen stars' orbits should be caused
by the gravitational pull of some massive object in the center of the galaxy. Yet
telescopes observe nothing there.
"The really important thing is that all the orbits have a common focus,"
astrophysicist Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
said during the recently concluded April 2012 meeting of the American

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Physical Society."There's one point on the sky, and there's nothing you can see
on images at this position."
Plus, all this is happening in a region only about 100 times as wide as the
distance between the Earth and the sun – very tiny in the galactic scheme of
things.
There is, however, a very faint emission of radio waves coming from this
area, which scientists call Sagittarius A* (pronounced "Sagittarius A-Star"). By
comparing it against the sun's movement around the Milky Way, researchers
have been able to determine that this object is barely moving at all – less than 1
kilometer (0.62 miles) a second, much slower even than the rate that the Earth
revolves around the sun.
If Sagittarius A* were any moderate-mass object, it likely would be
pulled by the gravity of nearby objects and experience some motion.
Reid said of the object's apparent stillness: "The only way that this can happen
is if Sagittarius A* is tied to a very massive object. When you do the analysis,
you get a lower limit of 4 million solar masses."

The density limit of a black hole

Astronomers can't see the galactic center well enough to measure exactly
how large Sagittarius A* is, but they can say for sure that its radius is no larger
than about two-tenths the distance between the Earth and the sun.

The means that in the center of the Milky Way, something packing about
4 million times the mass of the sun is sitting within an area that could fit inside
the orbit of Mercury and is basically invisible, producing much less light than
any of the stars orbiting it.

Right now, that puts this object's density at about an eighth of the
theoretical limit for a black hole. So while scientists can't say for sure the object
is a black hole, it's looking mighty likely.

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"Although there are alternative explanations, they would actually be even

much more fantastic than the rather mundane supermassive black hole that
almost certainly is there," Reid said.

One of these other, exotic explanations is that there exists a ball made of
an unidentified variety of heavy fermion particles. But even such a ball would
be unlikely to have the density required to explain all the evidence.

Looking closer
To finally solve this riddle, astronomers yearn to image the center of the
galaxy directly. Not only is it very distant and faint, this region is hard to see
because of all the dust between it and Earth.

Astronomers have recently begun a project called the Event Horizon

Telescope. This instrument would integrate many radio observatories around the
world, turning them into a giant interferometer capable of very precise
measurements. Ultimately, the resolution should be sharp enough to distinguish
Sagittarius A*.

So far, the Event Horizon Telescope has integrated only three

observatories, in Hawaii, California and Arizona, for an observing time of
between 15 and 20 hours. But astronomers hope to add more locations and
observing time soon.

"EHT is not a dream, it's not on the drawing board," said Avery
Broderickof Canada's University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for
Theoretical Physics."It's something that works."

One of Broderick's goals is not only determining once and for all if
Sagittarius A* is a black hole, but probing the physics of the object.

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Testing general relativity

Black holes straddle the two most successful theories of physics: one that
describes the realm of the very large, and one that describes the province of the
very small.

Black holes' extremely large masses invoke Einstein's general theory of

relativity, which describes how mass warps the fabric of space and time to
create gravity. But an explanation for black holes' extremely small spatial
dimensions also requires quantum mechanics.

So far, quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible. When

combined to describe black holes, the equations break down and suggest that
the density of a black hole is infinite.

Though the Event Horizon Telescope has produced only very preliminary
data so far, Broderick and his colleagues have used them to test the space-time
predictions of general relativity.

"Even with existing data today we can say something interesting about
the higher-order structure of astrophysical black holes," Broderick said. "We
will in principle be able to distinguish deviations from general relativity.

"General relativity is safe for right now, but it's not going to be safe for
much longer."

Article 2
Genre: Science

This article titled ‘We Need Conscious Robots’, written by Ryota Kanai, was
published in Nautilusin 2017.

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People often ask me whether human-level artificial intelligence will

eventually become conscious. My response is: Do you want it to be conscious? I
think it is largely up to us whether our machines will wake up.

That may sound presumptuous. The mechanisms of consciousness—the

reasons we have a vivid and direct experience of the world and of the self—are
an unsolved mystery in neuroscience, and some people think they always will
be; it seems impossible to explain subjective experience using the objective
methods of science. But in the 25 or so years that we’ve taken consciousness
seriously as a target of scientific scrutiny, we have made significant progress.
We have discovered neural activity that correlates with consciousness, and we
have a better idea of what behavioral tasks require conscious awareness. Our
brains perform many high-level cognitive tasks subconsciously.

Consciousness, we can tentatively conclude, is not a necessary byproduct

of our cognition. The same is presumably true of AIs. In many science-fiction
stories, machines develop an inner mental life automatically, simply by virtue of
their sophistication, but it is likelier that consciousness will have to be expressly
designed into them.

And we have solid scientific and engineering reasons to try to do that.

Our very ignorance about consciousness is one. The engineers of the 18th and
19th centuries did not wait until physicists had sorted out the laws of
thermodynamics before they built steam engines. It worked the other way
round: Inventions drove theory. So it is today. Debates on consciousness are
often too philosophical and spin around in circles without producing tangible
results. The small community of us who work on artificial consciousness aims
to learn by doing.

Furthermore, consciousness must have some important function for us, or

else evolution wouldn’t have endowed us with it. The same function would be

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of use to AIs. Here, too, science fiction might have misled us. For the AIs in
books and TV shows, consciousness is a curse. They exhibit unpredictable,
intentional behaviors, and things don’t turn out well for the humans. But in the
real world, dystopian scenarios seem unlikely. Whatever risks AIs may pose do
not depend on their being conscious. To the contrary, conscious machines could
help us manage the impact of AI technology. I would much rather share the
world with them than with thoughtless automatons.

When AlphaGo was playing against the human Go champion, Lee Sedol,
many experts wondered why AlphaGo played the way it did. They wanted some
explanation, some understanding of AlphaGo’s motives and rationales. Such
situations are common for modern AIs, because their decisions are not
preprogrammed by humans, but are emergent properties of the learning
algorithms and the data set they are trained on. Their inscrutability has created
concerns about unfair and arbitrary decisions. Already there have been cases of
discrimination by algorithms; for instance, a Propublica investigation last year
found that an algorithm used by judges and parole officers in Florida flagged
black defendants as more prone to recidivism than they actually were, and white
defendants as less prone than they actually were.

Beginning next year, the European Union will give its residents a legal
“right to explanation.” People will be able to demand an accounting of why an
AI system made the decision it did. This new requirement is technologically
demanding. At the moment, given the complexity of contemporary neural
networks, we have trouble discerning how AIs produce decisions, much less
translating the process into a language humans can make sense of.

If we can’t figure out why AIs do what they do, why don’t we ask them?
We can endow them with metacognition—an introspective ability to report their
internal mental states. Such an ability is one of the main functions of
consciousness. It is what neuroscientists look for when they test whether
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humans or animals have conscious awareness. For instance, a basic form of

metacognition, confidence, scales with the clarity of conscious experience.
When our brain processes information without our noticing, we feel uncertain
about that information, whereas when we are conscious of a stimulus, the
experience is accompanied by high confidence: “I definitely saw red!”

Any pocket calculator programmed with statistical formulas can provide

an estimate of confidence, but no machine yet has our full range of
metacognitive ability. Some philosophers and neuroscientists have sought to
develop the idea that metacognition is the essence of consciousness. So-called
higher-order theories of consciousness posit that conscious experience depends
on secondary representations of the direct representation of sensory states.
When we know something, we know that we know it. Conversely, when we
lack this self-awareness, we are effectively unconscious; we are on autopilot,
taking in sensory input and acting on it, but not registering it.

These theories have the virtue of giving us some direction for building
conscious AI. My colleagues and I are trying to implement metacognition in
neural networks so that they can communicate their internal states. We call this
project “machine phenomenology” by analogy with phenomenology in
philosophy, which studies the structures of consciousness through systematic
reflection on conscious experience. To avoid the additional difficulty of
teaching AIs to express themselves in a human language, our project currently
focuses on training them to develop their own language to share their
introspective analyses with one another. These analyses consist of instructions
for how an AI has performed a task; it is a step beyond what machines normally
communicate—namely, the outcomes of tasks. We do not specify precisely how
the machine encodes these instructions; the neural network itself develops a
strategy through a training process that rewards success in conveying the
instructions to another machine. We hope to extend our approach to establish

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human-AI communications, so that we can eventually demand explanations

from AIs.

Besides giving us some (imperfect) degree of self-understanding,

consciousness helps us achieve what neuroscientist Endel Tulving has called
“mental time travel.” We are conscious when predicting the consequences of
our actions or planning for the future. I can imagine what it would feel like if I
waved my hand in front of my face even without actually performing the
movement. I can also think about going to the kitchen to make coffee without
actually standing up from the couch in the living room.

In fact, even our sensation of the present moment is a construct of the

conscious mind. We see evidence for this in various experiments and case
studies. Patients with agnosia who have damage to object-recognition parts of
the visual cortex can’t name an object they see, but can grab it. If given an
envelope, they know to orient their hand to insert it through a mail slot. But
patients cannot perform the reaching task if experimenters introduce a time
delay between showing the object and cueing the test subject to reach for it.
Evidently, consciousness is related not to sophisticated information processing
per se; as long as a stimulus immediately triggers an action, we don’t need
consciousness. It comes into play when we need to maintain sensory
information over a few seconds.

The importance of consciousness in bridging a temporal gap is also

indicated by a special kind of psychological conditioning experiment. In
classical conditioning, made famous by Ivan Pavlov and his dogs, the
experimenter pairs a stimulus, such as an air puff to the eyelid or an electric
shock to a finger, with an unrelated stimulus, such as a pure tone. Test subjects
learn the paired association automatically, without conscious effort. On hearing
the tone, they involuntarily recoil in anticipation of the puff or shock, and when
asked by the experimenter why they did that, they can offer no explanation. But
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this subconscious learning works only as long as the two stimuli overlap with
each other in time. When the experimenter delays the second stimulus,
participants learn the association only when they are consciously aware of the
relationship—that is, when they are able to tell the experimenter that a tone
means a puff coming. Awareness seems to be necessary for participants to
retain the memory of the stimulus even after it stopped.

These examples suggest that a function of consciousness is to broaden

our temporal window on the world—to give the present moment an extended
duration. Our field of conscious awareness maintains sensory information in a
flexible, usable form over a period of time after the stimulus is no longer
present. The brain keeps generating the sensory representation when there is no
longer direct sensory input. The temporal element of consciousness can be
tested empirically. Francis Crick and Christof Koch proposed that our brain uses
only a fraction of our visual input for planning future actions. Only this input
should be correlated with consciousness if planning is its key function.

A common thread across these examples is counterfactual information

generation. It’s the ability to generate sensory representations that are not
directly in front of us. We call it “counterfactual” because it involves memory
of the past or predictions for unexecuted future actions, as opposed to what is
happening in the external world. And we call it “generation” because it is not
merely the processing of information, but an active process of hypothesis
creation and testing. In the brain, sensory input is compressed to more abstract
representations step by step as it flows from low-level brain regions to high-
level ones—a one-way or “feedforward” process. But neurophysiological
research suggests this feedforward sweep, however sophisticated, is not
correlated with conscious experience. For that, you need feedback from the
high-level to the low-level regions.

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Counterfactual information generation allows a conscious agent to detach

itself from the environment and perform non-reflexive behavior, such as waiting
for three seconds before acting. To generate counterfactual information, we
need to have an internal model that has learned the statistical regularities of the
world. Such models can be used for many purposes, such as reasoning, motor
control, and mental simulation.

Our AIs already have sophisticated training models, but they rely on our
giving them data to learn from. With counterfactual information generation, AIs
would be able to generate their own data—to imagine possible futures they
come up with on their own. That would enable them to adapt flexibly to new
situations they haven’t encountered before. It would also furnish AIs with
curiosity. When they are not sure what would happen in a future they imagine,
they would try to figure it out.

My team has been working to implement this capability. Already, though,

there have been moments when we felt that AI agents we created showed
unexpected behaviors. In one experiment, we simulated agents that were
capable of driving a truck through a landscape. If we wanted these agents to
climb a hill, we normally had to set that as a goal, and the agents would find the
best path to take. But agents endowed with curiosity identified the hill as a
problem and figured out how to climb it even without being instructed to do so.
We still need to do some more work to convince ourselves that something novel
is going on.

If we consider introspection and imagination as two of the ingredients of

consciousness, perhaps even the main ones, it is inevitable that we eventually
conjure up a conscious AI, because those functions are so clearly useful to any
machine. We want our machines to explain how and why they do what they do.
Building those machines will exercise our own imagination. It will be the
ultimate test of the counterfactual power of consciousness.
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Article 3

Genre: Social Studies

This article titled ‘3 Reasons Why Countries Devalue Their Currency’,written

by Adam Hayes, was published in Investopedia in 2019.

With a potential outbreak of a trade war between China and the US, talks
of the Chinese using currency devaluation as a strategy have been rumbling.
However, the volatility and risks involved may not make it worth it this time, as
China has made recent efforts to stabilize and globalize the Yuan.

In the past, the Chinese denied it, but the second largest economy in the
world has time and time again been accused of devaluing its currency in order
to advantage its own economy, especially by Donald Trump. The ironic thing is
that for many years, the United States government had been pressuring the
Chinese to devalue the Yuan, arguing that it gave them an unfair advantage in
international trade and kept their prices for capital and labor artificially low.

Ever since world currencies abandoned the gold standard and allowed
their exchange rates to float freely against each other, there have been many
currency devaluation events that have hurt not only the citizens of the country
involved but have also rippled across the globe. If the fallout can be so
widespread, why do countries devalue their currency?

Devaluing Currency
It may seem counter-intuitive, but a strong currency is not necessarily in a
nation's best interests. A weak domestic currency makes a nation's exports more
competitive in global markets, and simultaneously makes imports more
expensive. Higher export volumes spur economic growth, while pricey imports
also have a similar effect because consumers opt for local alternatives to
imported products. This improvement in the terms of trade generally translates

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into a lower current account deficit (or a greater current account surplus), higher
employment, and faster GDP growth. The stimulative monetary policies that
usually result in a weak currency also have a positive impact on the nation's
capital and housing markets, which in turn boosts domestic consumption
through the wealth effect.

It is worth noting that a strategic currency devaluation does not always

work, and moreover may lead to a 'currency war' between nations. Competitive
devaluation is a specific scenario in which one nation matches an abrupt
national currency devaluation with another currency devaluation. In other
words, one nation is matched by a currency devaluation of another. This occurs
more frequently when both currencies have managed exchange-rate regimes
rather than market-determined floating exchange rates. Even if a currency war
does not break out, a country should be wary about the negatives of currency
devaluation. Currency devaluation may lower productivity, since imports of
capital equipment and machinery may become too expensive. Devaluation also
significantly reduces the overseas purchasing power of a nation’s citizens.

Below, we look at the three top reasons why a country would pursue a policy of
devaluation:

1. To Boost Exports
On a world market, goods from one country must compete with those
from all other countries. Car makers in America must compete with car makers
in Europe and Japan. If the value of the euro decreases against the dollar, the
price of the cars sold by European manufacturers in America, in dollars, will be
effectively less expensive than they were before. On the other hand, a more
valuable currency make exports relatively more expensive for purchase in
foreign markets.

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In other words, exporters become more competitive in a global market.

Exports are encouraged while imports are discouraged. There should be some
caution, however, for two reasons. First, as the demand for a country's exported
goods increases worldwide, the price will begin to rise, normalizing the initial
effect of the devaluation. The second is that as other countries see this effect at
work, they will be incentivized to devalue their own currencies in kind in a so-
called "race to the bottom." This can lead to tit for tat currency wars and lead to
unchecked inflation.

2. To Shrink Trade Deficits

Exports will increase and imports will decrease due to exports becoming
cheaper and imports more expensive. This favors an improved balance of
payments as exports increase and imports decrease, shrinking trade deficits.
Persistent deficits are not uncommon today, with the United States and many
other nations running persistent imbalances year after year. Economic theory,
however, states that ongoing deficits are unsustainable in the long run and can
lead to dangerous levels of debt which can cripple an economy. Devaluing the
home currency can help correct balance of payments and reduce these deficits.

There is a potential downside to this rationale, however. Devaluation also

increases the debt burden of foreign-denominated loans when priced in the
home currency. This is a big problem for a developing country like India or
Argentina which hold lots of dollar- and euro-denominated debt. These foreign
debts become more difficult to service, reducing confidence among the people
in their domestic currency.

3. To Reduce Sovereign Debt Burdens

A government may be incentivized to encourage a weak currency policy
if it has a lot of government-issued sovereign debt to service on a regular basis.

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If debt payments are fixed, a weaker currency makes these payments effectively
less expensive over time.

Take for example a government who has to pay $1 million each month in
interest payments on its outstanding debts. But if that same $1 million of
notional payments becomes less valuable, it will be easier to cover that interest.
In our example, if the domestic currency is devalued to half of its initial value,
the $1 million debt payment will only be worth $500,000 now.

Again, this tactic should be used with caution. As most countries around
the globe have some debt outstanding in one form or another, a race to the
bottom currency war could be initiated. This tactic will also fail if the country in
question holds a large number of foreign bonds since it will make those interest
payments relatively more costly.

The Bottom Line

Currency devaluations can be used by countries to achieve economic
policy. Having a weaker currency relative to the rest of the world can help boost
exports, shrink trade deficits and reduce the cost of interest payments on its
outstanding government debts. There are, however, some negative effects of
devaluations. They create uncertainty in global markets that can cause asset
markets to fall or spur recessions. Countries might be tempted to enter a tit for
tat currency war, devaluing their own currency back and forth in a race to the
bottom. This can be a very dangerous and vicious cycle leading to much more
harm than good.

Devaluing a currency, however, does not always lead to its intended

benefits. Brazil is a case in point. The Brazilian real has plunged substantially
since 2011, but the steep currency devaluation has been unable to offset other
problems such as plunging crude oil and commodity prices, and a widening

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corruption scandal. As a result, the Brazilian economy has experienced sluggish

growth.

Article 4

Genre: Social Studies

This following article titled ‘A Salute to the Wheel’, written by Megan Gambino,
and was published inThe Smithsonian Magazine in 2009.

No wheels exist in nature.

Throughout history, most inventions were inspired by the natural world.

The idea for the pitchfork and table fork came from forked sticks; the airplane
from gliding birds. But the wheel is one hundred percent homo
sapien innovation. As Michael LaBarbera—a professor of biology and anatomy
at the University of Chicago—wrote in a 1983 issue of The American
Naturalist, only bacterial flagella, dung beetles and tumbleweeds come close.
And even they are “wheeled organisms” in the loosest use of the term, since
they use rolling as a form of locomotion.

The wheel was a relative latecomer.

We tend to think that inventing the wheel was item number two on our to-
do list after learning to walk upright. But several significant inventions predated
the wheel by thousands of years: sewing needles, woven cloth, rope, basket
weaving, boats and even the flute.

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The first wheels were not used for transportation.

Evidence indicates they were created to serve as potter’s wheels around

3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia—300 years before someone figured out to use them
for chariots.

The ancient Greeks invented Western philosophy…and the wheelbarrow.

Researchers believe that the wheelbarrow first appeared in classical

Greece, sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C., then sprung up
in China four centuries later and ended up in medieval Europe, perhaps by way
of Byzantium or the Islamic world. Although wheelbarrows were expensive to
purchase, they could pay for themselves in just 3 or 4 days in terms of labor
savings.

Art historian Andrea Matthies has found comical illustrations, one from
the 15th century, showing members of the upper classes being pushed to hell in
a wheelbarrow—quite possibly the origin for the expression “to hell in a
handbasket.”

Wheel of Fortune: More than just a game show.

The Wheel of Fortune, or Rota Fortunae, is much older than Pat Sajak. In
fact, the wheel, which the goddess Fortuna spins to determine the fate of those
she looks upon, is an ancient concept of either Greek or Roman origin,
depending on which academic you talk to. Roman scholar Cicero and the Greek
poet Pindar both reference the Wheel of Fortune. In The Canterbury Tales,
Geoffrey Chaucer uses the Wheel of Fortune to describe the tragic fall of
several historical figures in his Monk’s Tale. And William Shakespeare alludes

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to it in a few of his plays. “Fortune, good night, smile once more; turn thy
wheel!” says a disguised Earl of Kent in King Lear.

Camels 1; Wheel 0

Camels supplanted the wheel as the standard mode of transportation in

the Middle East and northern Africa between the second and the sixth centuries
A.D. Richard Bulliet cites several possible reasons in his 1975 book, The Camel
and the Wheel, including the decline of roads after the fall of the Roman Empire
and the invention of the camel saddle between 500 and 100 B.C. Despite
abandoning the wheel for hauling purposes, Middle Eastern societies continued
to use wheels for tasks such as irrigation, milling and pottery.

“Breaking on the wheel” was a form of capital punishment in the Middle

Ages.

This type of execution was medieval even by medieval standards. A

person could be stretched across the face of a wheel and bludgeoned to death or
have an iron-rimmed wheel pounded across the person’s bones with a hammer.
In another variation, Saint Catherine of Alexandria was wrapped around the rim
of a spiked wheel and rolled across the ground in the early fourth century.
Legend has it that the wheel “divinely” broke—sparing St. Catherine’s life,
until the Romans beheaded her. Since then, the breaking wheel has also been
called the “Catherine Wheel.” St. Catherine was named the patron saint of
wheelwrights.

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The oldest, most common design for a perpetual motion device is the
overbalanced wheel.

For centuries, tinkerers, philosophers, mathematicians and crackpots have

tried to design perpetual motion devices that, once set in motion, would
continue forever, producing more energy than they consume. One common take
on this machine is a wheel or water mill that uses changes in weight to
continually rotate. The overbalanced wheel, for example, has weighted arms
attached to the rim of the wheel that fold down or extend out. But no matter
what the design, they all violate the first and second laws of thermodynamics,
which state, respectively, that energy cannot be created or destroyed and that
some energy is always lost in converting heat to work. The U.S. patent office
refuses to assess claims for perpetual motion devices unless the inventors can
produce working models.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of patents.

According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the first patent
involving a wheel was issued to James Macomb of Princeton, New Jersey, on
August 26, 1791—just one year after the U.S. Patent Law was passed.
Macomb’s invention was a design for a horizontal, hollow water wheel to create
hydropower for mills. Although the patent office is aware of this patent being
issued, the original record was destroyed along with other patents from the 18th
century in an 1836 fire.

The earliest wheels in North America were used for toys.22K4248

It’s fair to say that when an advertisement describes a septic tank as “the
best invention since the wheel,” we’ve begun to take our round, load-bearing
companion for granted.

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In light of Smithsonian’s special July coverage of the frontiers of

innovation, we thought this would be an appropriate time to pay tribute to one
of the origins of innovation by sharing some intriguing, little-known facts about
the wheel.

Roulette means “small wheel” in French.

The origin of the gambling game roulette is a bit hazy. Some sources say
Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century French mathematician, invented it in his attempts
to create a perpetual motion device. But what’s more commonly accepted is that
roulette is an 18th century French creation that combined several existing
games.

The term “fifth wheel” comes from a part that was often used in carriages.

By definition, a fifth wheel is a wheel or a portion of a wheel with two

parts rotating on each other that sits on the front axle of a carriage and adds
extra support so it doesn’t tip. But it’s superfluous, really—which is why calling
someone a “fifth wheel” is a way of calling them unnecessary, basically a
tagalong.

How the bicycle ruined enlightened conversation.

As reported in the New York Times, an 1896 column in the London

Spectator mourned the impact of the bicycle on British society: “The phase of
the wheel’s influence that strike …most forcibly is, to put it briefly, the
abolition of dinner and the advent of lunch….If people can pedal away ten miles
or so in the middle of the day to a lunch for which they need no dress, where the
talk is haphazard, varied, light, and only too easy; and then glide back in the

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cool of the afternoon to dine quietly and get early to bed…conversation of the
more serious type will tend to go out.”

The first Ferris Wheel was built to rival the Eiffel Tower.

Norman Anderson, author of Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated History,

surmises that the first pleasure wheels, or early Ferris Wheels, were probably
just wheels with buckets, used to raise water from a stream, that children would
playfully grab hold of for a ride. But it was the “revolving wheel, 250 feet in
diameter and capable of carrying 2,160 persons per trip,” invented by George
Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. and unveiled at Chicago’s World Columbian Fair in
1893, that really brought the Ferris Wheel to the carnival scene. The fair
celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World,
and organizers wanted a centerpiece like the 984-foot Eiffel Tower that was
created for the Paris Exposition of 1889. Ferris answered that call. He
apparently told the press that he sketched every detail of his Ferris wheel over a
dinner at a Chicago chophouse, and no detail needed changing in its execution.

In movies and on TV, wheels appear to rotate in reverse.

Movie cameras typically operate at a speed of about 24 frames per

second. So basically, if a spoke of a wheel is in a 12 o’clock position in one
frame and then in the next frame, the spoke previously in the 9 o’clock position
has moved to 12 o’clock, then the wheel appears stationary. But if in that frame
another spoke is in the 11:30 position, then it appears to be revolving
backwards. This optical illusion, called the wagon wheel effect, also can occur
in the presence of a strobe light.

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One man actually succeeded in reinventing the wheel.

John Keogh, a freelance patent lawyer in Australia, submitted a patent

application for a “circular transportation facilitation device” in May 2001,
shortly after a new patent system was introduced in Australia. He wanted to
prove that the cheap, streamlined system, which allows inventors to draft a
patent online without the help of a lawyer, was flawed. His “wheel” was issued
a patent.

Article 5

Genre: History

The followingarticle is a speech titled ‘Message regarding Women’s Suffrage’

delivered by President Woodrow Wilson on 8 September 1916.

Madam President, Ladies of the Association:

I have found it a real privilege to be here to-night and to listen to the

addresses which you have heard. Though you may not all of you believe it, I
would a great deal rather hear somebody else speak than speak myself; but I
should feel that I was omitting a duty if I did not address you to-night and say
some of the things that have been in my thought as I realized the approach of
this evening and the duty that would fall upon me.

The astonishing thing about the movement which you represent is, not
that it has grown so slowly, but that it has grown so rapidly. No doubt for those
who have been a long time in the struggle, like your honored president, it seems
a long and arduous path that has been trodden, but when you think of the
cumulating force of this movement in recent decades, you must agree with me
that it is one of the most astonishing tides in modern history. Two generations

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ago, no doubt Madam President will agree with me in saying, it was a handful
of women who were fighting this cause. Now it is a great multitude of women
who are fighting it.

And there are some interesting historical connections which I would like
to attempt to point out to you. One of the most striking facts about the history of
the United States is that at the outset it was a lawyers' history. Almost all of the
questions to which America addressed itself, say a hundred years ago, were
legal questions, were questions of method, not questions of what you were
going to do with your Government, but questions of how you were going to
constitute your Government,—how you were going to balance the powers of the
States and the Federal Government, how you were going to balance the claims
of property against the processes of liberty, how you were going to make your
governments up so as to balance the parts against each other so that the
legislature would check the executive, and the executive the legislature, and the
courts both of them put together. The whole conception of government when
the United States became a Nation was a mechanical conception of government,
and the mechanical conception of government which underlay it was the
Newtonian theory of the universe. If you pick up the Federalist, some parts of it
read like a treatise on astronomy instead of a treatise on government. They
speak of the centrifugal and the centripetal forces, and locate the President
somewhere in a rotating system. The whole thing is a calculation of power and
an adjustment of parts. There was a time when nobody but a lawyer could know
enough to run the Government of the United States, and a distinguished English
publicist once remarked, speaking of the complexity of the American
Government, that it was no proof of the excellence of the American
Constitution that it had been successfully operated, because the Americans
could run any constitution. But there have been a great many technical
difficulties in running it.

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 23

And then something happened. A great question arose in this country

which, though complicated with legal elements, was at bottom a human
question, and nothing but a question of humanity. That was the slavery
question. And is it not significant that it was then, and then for the first time,
that women became prominent in politics in America? Not many women; those
prominent in that day were so few that you can name them over in a brief
catalogue, but, nevertheless, they then began to play a part in writing, not only,
but in public speech, which was a very novel part for women to play in
America. After the Civil War had settled some of what seemed to be the most
difficult legal questions of our system, the life of the Nation began not only to
unfold, but to accumulate. Life in the United States was a comparatively simple
matter at the time of the Civil War. There was none of that underground
struggle which is now so manifest to those who look only a little way beneath
the surface. Stories such as Dr. Davis has told to-night were uncommon in those
simpler days. The pressure of low wages, the agony of obscure and
unremunerated toil, did not exist in America in anything like the same
proportions that they exist now. And as our life has unfolded and accumulated,
as the contacts of it have become hot, as the populations have assembled in the
cities, and the cool spaces of the country have been supplanted by the feverish
urban areas, the whole nature of our political questions has been altered. They
have ceased to be legal questions. They have more and more become social
questions, questions with regard to the relations of human beings to one
another,—not merely their legal relations, but their moral and spiritual relations
to one another. This has been most characteristic of American life in the last
few decades, and as these questions have assumed greater and greater
prominence, the movement which this association represents has gathered
cumulative force. So that, if anybody asks himself, "What does this gathering
force mean," if he knows anything about the history of the country, he knows

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that it means something that has not only come to stay, but has come with
conquering power.

I get a little impatient sometimes about the discussion of the channels and
methods by which it is to prevail. It is going to prevail, and that is a very
superficial and ignorant view of it which attributes it to mere social unrest. It is
not merely because the women are discontented. It is because the women have
seen visions of duty, and that is something which we not only cannot resist, but,
if we be true Americans, we do not wish to resist. America took its origin in
visions of the human spirit, in aspirations for the deepest sort of liberty of the
mind and of the heart, and as visions of that sort come up to the sight of those
who are spiritually minded in America, America comes more and more into her
birthright and into the perfection of her development.

So that what we have to realize in dealing with forces of this sort is that
we are dealing with the substance of life itself. I have felt as I sat here to-night
the wholesome contagion of the occasion. Almost every other time that I ever
visited Atlantic City, I came to fight somebody. I hardly know how to conduct
myself when I have not come to fight against anybody, but with somebody. I
have come to suggest, among other things, that when the forces of nature are
steadily working and the tide is rising to meet the moon, you need not be afraid
that it will not come to its flood. We feel the tide; we rejoice in the strength of
it; and we shall not quarrel in the long run as to the method of it. Because, when
you are working with masses of men and organized bodies of opinion, you have
got to carry the organized body along. The whole art and practice of
government consists not in moving individuals, but in moving masses. It is all
very well to run ahead and beckon, but, after all, you have got to wait for the
body to follow. I have not come to ask you to be patient, because you have
been, but I have come to congratulate you that there was a force behind you that

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will beyond any peradventure be triumphant, and for which you can afford a
little while to wait.

Article 6

Genre: Literature

The following short story titled ‘The Lumber Room’ was written by Saki (the
pseudonym used by Hector Hugh Munro), and was published in 1914.

The children were to be driven, as a special treat, to the sands at

Jagborough. Nicholas, in trouble, was not to attend. Only that morning he had
refused to eat his bread-and-milk claiming there was a frog in it. Older and
wiser people had told him that there could not possibly be a frog in his bread-
and-milk and that he was not to talk nonsense; but he continued and described
in great detail the coloration and markings of the frog. “You said there couldn’t
possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-
milk,” he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend
to shift from favorable ground.

So, his boy-cousin and girl-cousin and his younger brother were to be
taken to Jagborough sands that afternoon and he was to stay at home. His
cousins’ aunt, who insisted in calling herself his aunt also, had invented the
Jagborough trip in order to impress on Nicholas the fun that he had given up by
his disgraceful conduct at the breakfast-table. It was her habit, whenever one of
the children misbehaved, to create some special trip from which the offender
would be left out; if all the children sinned collectively they were suddenly
informed of a circus in a neighboring town, a circus of unrivalled merit and
uncounted elephants, to which, but for their depravity, they would have been
taken that very day.

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As the party drove away the aunt commanded, “You are not to go into the
gooseberry garden.”

“Why not?” demanded Nicholas.

“Because you are in trouble,” said the aunt loftily.

Nicholas did not admit the flawlessness of the reasoning; he felt perfectly
capable of being in trouble and in a gooseberry garden at the same time. It was
clear to his aunt that he was determined to get into the gooseberry garden,
“only,” as she remarked to herself, “because I have told him he is not to.”

Now the gooseberry garden had two doors by which it might be entered,
and once a small person like Nicholas slipped in there he could basically
disappear from view amid the growth of artichokes, raspberry canes, and fruit
bushes. The aunt had many other things to do that afternoon, but she spent an
hour or two in trivial gardening operations among flower beds and shrubberies,
where she could keep a watchful eye on the two doors that led to the forbidden
paradise.

Nicholas made one or two trips into the front garden, wriggling his way
with obvious stealth of purpose towards one or other of the doors, but never
able for a moment to evade the aunt’s watchful eye. As a matter of fact, he had
no intention of trying to get into the gooseberry garden, but it was convenient
for him that his aunt believe that he had; it was a belief that would keep her
busy for the greater part of the afternoon. Having thoroughly confirmed her
suspicions Nicholas slipped back into the house and rapidly put into execution a
plan of action that had long developed in his brain. By standing on a chair in the
library one could reach a shelf which held a fat, importantlooking key. The key
was as important as it looked as it kept the mysteries of the lumber-room secure

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from unauthorized intrusion. The key turned stiffly in the lock, but it turned.
The door opened, and Nicholas was in an unknown land.

Often Nicholas had pictured what the lumber-room might be like, it was
so carefully sealed from youthful eyes and about which no questions were ever
answered. It lived up to his expectations. It was large and dimly lit, one high
window opening on to the forbidden garden being its only source of light and
was a storehouse of unimagined treasures. The aunt was one of those people
who think that things spoil by use and consign them to dust and damp by way of
preserving them. The parts of the house Nicholas knew best were bare and
cheerless, but here there were wonderful things for the eye to feast on. There
was a piece of framed tapestry that was evidently meant to be a fire-screen. To
Nicholas it was a living, breathing story; telling of a story of a huntsman in
some remote time period. Nicholas sat for many minutes reliving the
possibilities of the scene.

There were other objects of delight and interest claiming his instant
attention: there were twisted candlesticks in the shape of snakes, and a teapot
fashioned like a china duck, out of whose open beak the tea was supposed to
come. How dull and shapeless the nursery teapot seemed in comparison! And
there was a carved sandal-wood box packed tight with aromatic cotton-wool,
and between the layers of cotton-wool were little brass figures, hump-necked
bulls, and peacocks and goblins, delightful to see and to handle. Less promising
in appearance was a large square book with plain black covers; Nicholas peeped
into it, and, behold, it was full of colored pictures of birds. And such birds! In
the garden, and in the lanes when he went for a walk, Nicholas came across a
few birds, of which the largest were an occasional magpie or wood-pigeon; here
were herons and bustards, kites, toucans, tiger-bitterns, brush turkeys, ibises,
golden pheasants, a whole portrait gallery of undreamed-of creatures. As he was
admiring the coloring of the mandarin duck and assigning a life-history to it, the
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shrill voice of his auntcaught his attention. She had grown suspicious at his long
disappearance, and had leapt to the conclusion that he had climbed over the wall
behind the screen of the lilac bushes; she was now engaged in energetic and
rather hopeless search for him among the artichokes and raspberry canes.

“Nicholas, Nicholas!” she screamed, “you are to come out of this at once.
It’s no use trying to hide there; I can see you all the time.”

The angry repetitions of Nicholas’ name gave way to a shriek, and a cry
for somebody to come quickly. Nicholas shut the book, restored it carefully to
its place in a corner, and shook some dust from a neighboring pile of
newspapers over it. Then he crept from the room, locked the door, and replaced
the key exactly where he had found it. His aunt was still calling his name when
he sauntered into the front garden.

“Who’s calling?” he asked.

“Me,” came the answer from the other side of the wall; “didn’t you hear
me? I’ve been looking for you in the gooseberry garden, and I’ve slipped into
the rain-water tank. Luckily there’s no water in it, but the sides are slippery and
I can’t get out. Fetch the little ladder from under the cherry tree —”

“I was told I wasn’t to go into the gooseberry garden,” said Nicholas

promptly.

“I told you not to, and now I tell you that you may,” came the voice from
the rainwater tank, rather impatiently.

“Your voice doesn’t sound like aunt’s,” objected Nicholas; “you may be
the Evil One tempting me to be disobedient. Aunt often tells me that the Evil
One tempts me and that I always yield. This time I’m not going to yield.”

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“Don’t talk nonsense,” said the prisoner in the tank; “go and fetch the
ladder.”

“Will there be strawberry jam for tea?” asked Nicholas innocently.

“Certainly, there will be,” said the aunt, privately resolving that Nicholas
should have none of it.

“Now I know that you are the Evil One and not aunt,” shouted Nicholas
gleefully; “when we asked aunt for strawberry jam yesterday she said there
wasn’t any. I know there are four jars of it in the store cupboard, because I
looked, and of course you know it’s there, but she doesn’t, because she said
there wasn’t any. Oh, Devil, you have sold yourself!” He walked noisily away,
and it was a kitchenmaid, in search of parsley, who eventually rescued the aunt
from the rain-water tank.

Tea that evening was partaken of in a fearsome silence. The tide had been
at its highest when the children had arrived at Jagborough Cove, so there had
been no sandsto play on — a circumstance that the aunt had overlooked in the
haste of organizing her the expedition. The tightness of Bobby’s boots had had
disastrous effect on his temper the whole of the afternoon, and altogether the
children could not have been said to have enjoyed themselves. The aunt
maintained the frozen muteness of one who has suffered undignified and
unmerited detention in a rain-water tank for thirty-five minutes. As for
Nicholas, he, too, was silent, in the absorption of one who has much to think
about; as he imagined the treasures hidden in the lumber room.

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