A Guide to the Library's Facilities(设备)

To use or reserve the facilities of the library, follow the procedures given at the circulation desk.

    Group Study Rooms (2F)

Students and teaching staff can use these rooms for group study. Students are advised to use unlocked rooms (3 rooms for 2 people, 2 rooms for 4 people) available for free. When you use locked rooms (2 rooms for 4 people, 1 room for 10 people), you need to go through reservation procedures at the circulation desk. These rooms are available for group discussion.

    Individual Reading Rooms (1-3F)

    There are 4 single rooms available for use by teaching staff and visiting scholars. Each room is equipped with a computer together 1 printer and 6 scanners. Reservation of these rooms is available for a period up to seven days on end.

    Meeting Rooms and Seminar Rooms (1-3F)

    Only teaching staff and graduate students can apply to use these rooms and reserve them one day in advance. The total number of seats is 40. They are available for workshops and small seminars.

    Computer Rooms (4F)

    These rooms are available for classes or seminars and so on. The total number of seats is 88. Only teaching staff can apply to use the computer rooms and reserve them one day in advance.

    Joy Mangano was 33 and divorced. She had three kids under age 7, and was barely keeping up payments on her small two-bedroom home by working extra hours as a waitress. “There were times when I would lie in bed and think, I don't know how I'm going to pay that bill,” Mangano says.

    But he had a special ability for seeing the obvious thing. She knew how hard it was to mop the floor. “I was tired of bending down, putting my hands in dirty water, wringing (拧) out a mop,” Mangano says. “So, There's gotta be a better way.

    How about a “self-wringing” mop? She designed a special tool you could twist in two directions at once, and still keep your hands clean and dry. She set out to sell it, first a few at flea markers.

    Then Mangano met with the media. But would couch potatoes (电视迷）buy a mop? The experts on shopping TV were less than certain. They gave it a try, and it failed. Mangano was sure it would sell if they'd let her do the on-camera display. She said, “Get me on that stage, and I will sell this mop because it's a great item.”

    So QVC, a multinational corporation specializing in televised home shopping, took a chance on her. “ I got onstage and the phones went crazy. We sold every mop in minutes.”

    Today she's president of Ingenious Designs, a multimillion-dollar company, and one of the stars of HSN, the Home Shopping Network. Talking about the household invention, Mangano says, “It is as natural for me as it is for a parent to talk about their child.”

    As global temperatures rise, trees around the world are experiencing longer growing seasons, sometimes as much as three extra weeks a year. All that time helps trees grow faster. For the past 100 years, trees have been experiencing fast growth in temperate regions from Maryland to Finland, to Central Europe, where the growth rate of some trees has even sped up nearly 77% since 1870. Assuming wood is just as strong today, those gains would mean more timber(木材) for building, burning, and storing carbon captured from the atmosphere. But is wood really as dense as it used to be?

    Hans Pretzsch, a forest scientist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, and his colleagues wanted to find an answer. They carried out a study of the forests of Central Europe. They started with 41 experimental plots in southern Germany, some of which have been continuously monitored since 1870. Pretzsch and his team took core samples from the trees—which included Norway spruce, sessile oak, European beech, and Scots pine—and analyzed the tree rings using a high-frequency probe.

    They found that in all four species, wood density has decreased by 8% to 12%, they report online in Forest Ecology and Management. “We expected a trend of the wood density like this, but not such a strong and significant decrease,” Pretzsch says. Increasing temperatures, and the faster growth they spur, probably account for some of the drop. Another factor, Pretzsch says, is more nitrogen in the soil from agricultural fertilizer(化肥) and vehicle exhaust. Previous studies have linked increased fertilizer use to decreased wood density. Above all, the study suggests that the higher temperatures—combined with pollution from auto exhaust and farms—are making wood weaker, resulting in trees that break more easily and wood that is less durable.

    “I am getting worried,” says Richard Houghton, an ecologist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, who was not part of the new study. As the density of the samples dropped, so did their carbon content, by about 50%. That means forests may suffer more damage from storms and may be less efficient at soaking up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) than scientists had thought, Houghton says.

    The sun was shining and Clare felt like doing something active. She'd had enough of the moment of living in the past. What she really wanted was some skiing if she could get herself organized. She walked into the ski school office and within ten minutes had arranged a private class for the whole afternoon. One of the ski teacher would meet her at the ski lift station at the end of the village at midday. The ski hire shop next door rented her some skis and boots and she carried them back to the hotel. There she changed into some more or less suitable clothes and took the hotel's electric taxi down to the lift station. She was a bit early and had time to look around, and get nervous. She hadn't skied for about ten years, though she'd been quite good at that time. Everyone said it was liking riding a bike-you didn't forget how to do it. She stood there looking up at the mountains, trying to remember what to do.

    Madam Newton?" Yes," she said. And there was her ski teacher, looking exactly like all the other ski teachers she remembered sun-tanned, handsome and totally self-confident. Half an hour later all thoughts of the unhappy days had disappeared as she skied behind Bruno and concentrated on staying on her feet.

    "Upper body still, make your legs do the work, Madame", shouted Bruno over his shoulder. "Call me Clare, please" she said. "OK. Lean forward a bit more, Clare. That's it. Good. You are remembering now, en?" "Yeah, I am ... slowly. It's great. I'd forgotten what an amazing buzz skiing gives you".

    They skied down some different runs with Bruno being wonderfully encouraging, and she really did begin to feel confident on the skis. Going up in the lifts, Clare and Bruno chatted — just the usual "where are you from, what do you do" sort of chat, but it was pleasantly relaxing. In the middle of the afternoon, they stopped at an old farmhouse for coffee and apple cake. There were lots of other skiers doing the same. Clare felt as if she belonged - something about being part of a group, all with a shared interest, she supposed. It was a feeling she'd not had for a long time.

    Bruno said hello to a few people, and went over to talk to one of the waiters. Clare took the opportunity to study him a bit. Up until now, she'd just been skiing behind a man in a red ski suit, so it was interesting to see that he was quite tall, with curly brown hair and eyes to match. From the colour of his face he looked as if he'd spent his whole life in the open air. She guessed he was about forty.

    "Are you in Zermatt for long, Clare?" asked Bruno, after he'd been sitting with her a few minutes, "No, only a few days probably. Just a short break to get away from everything at home", replied Clare. She didn't feel like explaining the real reason. People looked at her differently when they knew. "But I'd like to do some more skiing. Would you be able to do anything tomorrow?"

    "I think so. But you'll have to book it through the ski school office. I can't arrange anything with you directly", said Bruno, putting on his gloves and standing up. "Come on. Let's do a bit more now." "Great," replied Clare. After another hour, Clare said, "Time to stop, I think," Bruno agreed. "You should have a sauna tonight. It'll help your body relax. Not so stiff (僵硬的）tomorrow, you know." Clare didn't care about stiff she was going to be tomorrow. She hadn't felt quite as good as this for months — full of fresh air, physically tired but in her mind — alive. Happy! Yes, that was how she felt.

Sleep is essential for a person's well-being. Researchers have found that sleep loss increases a person's risk of developing serious medical conditions. Now, a new study has found that getting enough sleep is also the key to improving academic performance.

Jeffrey Grossman, who led the research, was not trying to find the correlation(相关性) between sleep and grades when he handed out a device to the students in his class. Instead, the professor hoped the popular wrist-worn electronic device, which tracks a person's activity 24/7, would show a connection between physical exercise and academic achievement.

As part of the research, a quarter of the participants chose a fitness class specially created for the study. After the school term ended, the researchers carefully analysed the data. Much to Grossman's surprise, they found no measurable difference in test performance between the group that had been physically active and the group that had not.

However, the study presented a surprising viewpoint in the journal Science of Learning. Going through the large amount of data, Grossman noticed an interesting trend(趋势) from the participants' sleep patterns. There was a straight-line relationship between the average amount of sleep and his/her grade in the exams.

Besides, it was not enough for students to just head to bed early the night before a test. Grossman says, "We've heard the phrase ‘Get a good night's sleep. You've got a big day tomorrow.' It turns out this does not relate at all to test performance. Instead, it's the sleep you get during the days when learning is happening that matters most."

The time when students went to bed each night was similarly important. Those who went to bed in the early hours of the morning performed poorly, even if the total sleep time was the same as a higher-performing student.

The research does not prove that sleep is the only component that helps improve academic performance. However, Grossman says the results are a strong indication that sleep really matters. Who knew getting A's just required some extra ZZZ's?

Born in France, but raised in Spain,linguistics and literature professor Juan José Ciruela Alférez from the University of Granada is passionate about Chinese literature and has been doing some research about it. With painstaking effort, his Spanish translation of a Chinese classic was published last year. 

Ciruela said translating the novel was an interesting challenge. In recent years, many Chinese works have been introduced to Spain. However, as most of them had been translated first into English and then from that language into Spanish, much of the originality,was lost. For this reason, when the Spanish publishing house Kailas contacted Ciruela to translate it directly from Chinese, he accepted the mission immediately, even if it presented difficulties like a heavy workload within a short time limit.  

"I encountered various difficulties, especially at the beginning of the task," said Ciruela in an interview. "This novel, in particular, needs a prior reading process in which the translator gets into the plot and the characters, since at first it is difficult to enter the world that the novel constantly raises. So I read the novel first in Chinese, paying attention to all those details and how all of that could be translated in a way that the Spanish readers would understand."

For Ciruela, the most important criterion when translating is fidelity(忠诚) to the original text. While it is true that one cannot always be strictly faithful, he believes translators should not be too far from original texts. For example, the translation of culturemes (expressions of culture in language) is quite complicated due to the cultural gap between Spanish and Chinese. Ciruela believes that these must always be appropriate to the specific function they perform within the text, in each specific case and moment.