Questões de Inglês

  Working for on demand startups like Uber and TaskRabbit is supposed to offer flexible hours and higher wages, but many workers have found the pay lower and the hours less flexible than they expected. Even more surprising: 8 percent of those chauffeuring passengers and 16 percent of those making deliveries said they lack personal auto insurance.

  Those are among the findings from a survey about the work life of independent contractors for on demand startups, a booming sector of the tech industry, being released Wednesday.

  “We want to shed light on the industry as a whole,” said Isaac Madan, a Stanford master’s candidate in bioinformatics who worked with two other Stanford students and a recent alumnus on the survey of 1,330 workers. “People need to understand how this space will change and evolve and help the economy.”

  On demand, often called the sharing economy, refers to companies that let users summon workers via smartphone apps to handle all manner of services: rides, cleaning, chores, deliveries, car parking, waiting in lines. Almost uniformly, those workers are independent contractors rather than salaried employees.

  That status is the main point of contention in a recent rash of lawsuits in which workers are filing for employee status. While the survey did not directly ask contractors if they would prefer to be employees, it found that their top workplace desires were to have paid health insurance, retirement benefits and paid time off for holidays, vacation and sick days – all perks of full time workers. Respondents also expressed interest in havingmore chances for advancement, education sponsorship, disability insurance and human relations support.

  Because respondents were recruited rather than randomly selected, the survey does not claim to be representational but a conclusion one may come to is that flexibility of new jobs comes with a cost. Not all workers are prepared for that!

SFChronicle.com and SFGate.com, May 20, 2015. Adaptado.

    About half of the world’s population is at risk of contracting dengue, according to the World Health Organization. The mosquito is found in tropical and subtropical climates around the world; however, dengue does not naturally occur in these creatures: the mosquitoes get dengue from us.

    The mechanism of dengue infection is simple. Female mosquitoes bite humans because they need the protein found in our blood to produce eggs. (Male mosquitoes do not bite.) If the mosquito bites someone with dengue – and then, after the virus’s roughly eight- to 12-day replication period, bites someone else – it passes dengue into its next victim’s bloodstream.

    There is no vaccine against dengue, but infecting mosquitoes with a natural bacterium called Wolbachia blocks the insects’ ability to pass the disease to humans. The microbe spreads among both male and female mosquitoes: infected females lay eggs that harbor the bacterium, and when Wolbachia-free females mate with infected males, their eggs simply do not hatch. Researchers are now releasing Wolbachia-infected females into the wild in Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Brazil.

Scientific American, June 2015. Adaptado.

          We’ve modified our behavior so we can text and walk

Texting – or checking social media or reading/responding to mail or reading the news or checking the weather or watching a video – while walking is a pretty common phenomenon. It’s so common that most people who own a mobile device have become texting walkers. Research suggests that these texters adopt protective measures to minimize the risk of accidents when walking. They’re less likely to trip because they shorten their step length, reduce step frequency, lengthen the time during which both feet are in contact with the ground, and increase obstacle clearance height. Taken together this creates an exaggerated image of walking, but it apparently slows the walker enough so that he registers some of what is happening around him and can compensate for it.

(Adaptado de  http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-inpractice/ we-ve-modified-our-behavior-so-we-can-text-and-walk/.) 

             Advice for new students from those who know (old students)

The first day of college I was a ball of nerves. I remember walking into my first class and running to the first seat I found, thinking everyone would be staring at me. But nobody seemed to notice and then it hit me: The fact that nobody knew me meant nobody would judge, which, upon reflection, was what I was scared of the most. I told myself to let go. All along the year, I forced myself into situations that were uncomfortable for me – for example, auditioning for a dance piece. Believe it or not, that performance was a highlight of my freshman year. My advice: challenge yourself to try something new, something you couldn’t have done in high school. – Ria Jagasia, Vanderbilt University, ’18.  

(Adaptado de http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/ education/edlife/ advice-for-new-students-from-those-who-know-old-students.html?ref= edlife.)

             Advice for new students from those who know (old students)

The first day of college I was a ball of nerves. I remember walking into my first class and running to the first seat I found, thinking everyone would be staring at me. But nobody seemed to notice and then it hit me: The fact that nobody knew me meant nobody would judge, which, upon reflection, was what I was scared of the most. I told myself to let go. All along the year, I forced myself into situations that were uncomfortable for me – for example, auditioning for a dance piece. Believe it or not, that performance was a highlight of my freshman year. My advice: challenge yourself to try something new, something you couldn’t have done in high school. – Ria Jagasia, Vanderbilt University, ’18.  

(Adaptado de http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/ education/edlife/ advice-for-new-students-from-those-who-know-old-students.html?ref= edlife.)