那么，悔恨是否一种源于性格弱点的情感，而这种弱点在男人身上更为常见？

　　我确实发现，在面临人生灾难和重大抉择的时刻，女人往往比男人理智。她们同样悲痛难当，但她们能够不让感情蒙蔽理智。这也许是因为，男人的理智是逻辑，与感情异质，容易在感情的冲击下溃散；女人的理智是直觉，与感情同质，所以能够在感情的汹涌中保持完好无损。

也许可以说，男人站得高些，视野宽些，所以容易瞻前顾后，追悔往事，忧虑未来。但是，女人的状态是更健康的，她们更贴近生命的自然之道。当男人为亲人的去世痛心疾首时，女人嘹亮地抚尸恸哭，然后利索地替尸体洗浴更衣，送亲人踏上通往天国的路。

12 October 2009

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2009 to

Elinor Ostrom
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA,

"for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons"

and

Oliver E. Williamson
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA,

"for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm"

Elinor Ostrom has demonstrated how common property can be successfully managed by user associations. Oliver Williamson has developed a theory where business firms serve as structures for conflict resolution. Over the last three decades these seminal contributions have advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention.

Economic transactions take place not only in markets, but also within firms, associations, households, and agencies. Whereas economic theory has comprehensively illuminated the virtues and limitations of markets, it has traditionally paid less attention to other institutional arrangements. The research of Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson demonstrates that economic analysis can shed light on most forms of social organization.

Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes.

Oliver Williamson has argued that markets and hierarchical organizations, such as firms, represent alternative governance structures which differ in their approaches to resolving conflicts of interest. The drawback of markets is that they often entail haggling and disagreement. The drawback of firms is that authority, which mitigates contention, can be abused. Competitive markets work relatively well because buyers and sellers can turn to other trading partners in case of dissent. But when market competition is limited, firms are better suited for conflict resolution than markets. A key prediction of Williamson's theory, which has also been supported empirically, is therefore that the propensity of economic agents to conduct their transactions inside the boundaries of a firm increases along with the relationship-specific features of their assets.

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2009 is awarded to the German author Herta Müller

"who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".

Biobibliographical notes

Herta Müller was born on August 17, 1953 in the German-speaking town Nitzkydorf in Banat, Romania. Her parents were members of the German-speaking minority in Romania. Her father had served in the Waffen SS during World War II. Many German Romanians were deported to the Soviet Union in 1945, including Müller's mother who spent five years in a work camp in present-day Ukraine. Many years later, in Atemschaukel (2009), Müller was to depict the exile of the German Romanians in the Soviet Union. From 1973 to 1976, Müller studied German and Romanian literature at the university in Timişoara (Temeswar). During this period, she was associated with Aktionsgruppe Banat, a circle of young German-speaking authors who, in opposition to Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, sought freedom of speech. After completing her studies, she worked as a translator at a machine factory from 1977 to 1979. She was dismissed when she refused to be an informant for the secret police. After her dismissal, she was harassed by Securitate.

Müller made her debut with the collection of short stories Niederungen (1982), which was censored in Romania. Two years later, she published the uncensored version in Germany and, in the same year, Drückender Tango in Romania. In these two works, Müller depicts life in a small, German-speaking village and the corruption, intolerance and repression to be found there. The Romanian national press was very critical of these works while, outside of Romania, the German press received them very positively. Because Müller had publicly criticized the dictatorship in Romania, she was prohibited from publishing in her own country. In 1987, Müller emigrated together with her husband, author Richard Wagner.

The novels Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (1992), Herztier (1994; The Land of Green Plums, 1996) and Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997; The Appointment, 2001) give, with chiselled details, a portrait of daily life in a stagnated dictatorship. Müller has given guest lectures at universities, colleges and other venues in Paderborn, Warwick, Hamburg, Swansea, Gainsville (Florida), Kassel, Göttingen, Tübingen and Zürich among other places. She lives in Berlin. Since 1995 she has served as a member of Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, in Darmstadt.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 awards studies of one of life's core processes: the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life. Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

Inside every cell in all organisms, there are DNA molecules. They contain the blueprints for how a human being, a plant or a bacterium, looks and functions. But the DNA molecule is passive. If there was nothing else, there would be no life.

The blueprints become transformed into living matter through the work of ribosomes. Based upon the information in DNA, ribosomes make proteins: oxygen-transporting haemoglobin, antibodies of the immune system, hormones such as insulin, the collagen of the skin, or enzymes that break down sugar. There are tens of thousands of proteins in the body and they all have different forms and functions. They build and control life at the chemical level.

An understanding of the ribosome's innermost workings is important for a scientific understanding of life. This knowledge can be put to a practical and immediate use; many of today's antibiotics cure various diseases by blocking the function of bacterial ribosomes. Without functional ribosomes, bacteria cannot survive. This is why ribosomes are such an important target for new antibiotics.

Charles K. Kao
Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong

"for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"

and the other half jointly to

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

"for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor"

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies. They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration. In 1966, Charles K. Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. Kao's enthusiasm inspired other researchers to share his vision of the future potential of fiber optics. The first ultrapure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970.

Today optical fibers make up the circulatory system that nourishes our communication society. These low-loss glass fibers facilitate global broadband communication such as the Internet. Light flows in thin threads of glass, and it carries almost all of the telephony and data traffic in each and every direction. Text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second.

If we were to unravel all of the glass fibers that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometers long – which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25 000 times – and is increasing by thousands of kilometers every hour.

A large share of the traffic is made up of digital images, which constitute the second part of the award. In 1969 Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device). The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein and for which he was awarded the 1921 year's Nobel Prize. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge when designing an image sensor was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, pixels, in a short time.

The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film. The digital form facilitates the processing and distribution of these images. CCD technology is also used in many medical applications, e.g. imaging the inside of the human body, both for diagnostics and for microsurgery.

Digital photography has become an irreplaceable tool in many fields of research. The CCD has provided new possibilities to visualize the previously unseen. It has given us crystal clear images of distant places in our universe as well as the depths of the oceans.

Charles Kuen Kao, British and US citizen. Born 1933 in Shanghai, China. Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering 1965 from Imperial College London, UK. Director of Engineering at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK. Vice-chancellor, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Retired 1996.
www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Charles_Kao

Willard Sterling Boyle, Canadian and US citizen. Born 1924 in Amherst, NS, Canada. Ph.D. in Physics 1950 from McGill University, QC, Canada. Executive Director of Communication Sciences Division, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Retired 1979.
www.science.ca/scientists/scientistprofile.php?pID=129

George Elwood Smith, US citizen. Born 1930 in White Plains, NY, USA. Ph.D. in Physics 1959 from University of Chicago, IL, USA. Head of VLSI Device Department, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Retired 1986.
www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:George_E_Smith

Prize amount: SEK 10 million. Kao is awarded one half, Boyle and Smith share the other half.

Every cell in our bodies contains our entire genome, the blueprint for life, wrapped up within its chromosomes. Each time one of our cells divides to form two new cells, its chromosomes need to be perfectly replicated so that each new cell receives an exact copy of the blueprint. As early as the 1930s, long before the molecular nature of DNA was understood, people such as Hermann Muller and Barbara McClintock had noticed that the very ends of the chromosomes appeared to serve an important protective role. But what these ‘telomeres’, or end parts, actually were remained a mystery.

The first great strides in unravelling telomere function, and understanding how they are maintained, were taken in the late 1970s and early 80s, and it is this work that the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine rewards. Elizabeth Blackburn used early DNA-sequencing techniques to show that telomeres were made up of short, repeated pieces of DNA. Next, she and Jack Szostak performed an experiment showing that telomeres from one species, a pond-dwelling single-celled organism called tetrahymena, could protect DNA molecules, or mini-chromosomes, from a very distant organism, yeast. The fact that this protective effect was conserved across such vast stretches of evolution told them that they were witnessing a very fundamental biological mechanism in action.

Elizabeth Blackburn and her graduate student Carol Greider then went looking for the mechanism that maintains telomeres, and on Christmas day, 1984, discovered the first evidence for the enzyme telomerase. Combining both protein and RNA components, telomerase is a reverse transcriptase which adds telomere DNA to the ends of molecules using an RNA template. Its discovery presented a solution to one aspect of the puzzling 'end replication problem' which had confounded molecular biologists, who had been unable to understand how DNA could be added to the very tip of one of the two strands of replicating DNA during cell division. By providing, with its RNA, a template for DNA synthesis, telomerase is able to build a platform onto the end of the molecule from which other DNA-synthesizing enzymes can then operate.

This is the 100th time the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded, and the first time that any Nobel Prize in the sciences has been awarded to more than one woman. Telomere and telomerase disfunction is now linked with a number of disease states, and therapeutic approaches based upon targeting this system are in development.