9月22日
Christian Belady: A Passion for Creativity
Distinguished Hewlett-Packard inventor teaches the art of innovation
Christian Belady gets paid to inspire people. The 45-year-old “distinguished technologist” for Hewlett-Packard Co. (H-P) teaches the art of innovation to H-P employees around the country.
Apparently, he’s pretty effective. Last year, H-P produced 1,797 patents, third behind only international Business Machines Corporation and Canon Kabushiki Kaisha in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office proficiency.
Eight of those patents bore Belady’s name. In the last six years, he’s come up with more than 100 inventions to make computing hardware more powerful and energy-efficient.
“But that number is irrelevant if I haven’t infected others with the passion for learning and innovation,” says Belady at H-P’s international hub for supercomputing research and development next to the University of Texas at Dallas.
“My goal is to help develop the next generation of inventors who collectively will create more new ideas by a quantum magnitude than I ever could. This is what I hope my legacy will be.”
Making room for creativity
Another legacy is even more important to Belady. He wants to teach his two children through the power of imaginative play—just as his father did.
He wants you to do the same. Give children boxes and throw away the toys, Belady pleads. Electronic games and toys that are too realistic are numbing the creativity that has made Americans innovative leaders.
His 4-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter can’t watch more than an hour of TV each day and must play outside for an hour—even when it’s raining. Except for the formal areas, the family’s house is in a perpetual state of mess with the kids’ projects.
“My son’s friends all have Star Wars light sabers. He made his out of wrapping paper tubes that telescope. That’s the kind of stuff I did as a kid.”
His 77-year-old father, Laszlo Belady, a Hungarian immigrant and a founder Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation of Texas, made Christian use his mental prowess to create playthings.
Specialized Terms
Patent (n) 专利权 the official legal right to make or sell an invention for a particular number of years
Quantum magnitude (n) 大量 a great number of something
Telescope (v) 缩叠；缩折 to slide inward or outward in overlapping sections
Vocabulary Focus
Bear (v) to have an identifying mark
Infect (v) to make someone else have one’s same feeling
Legacy (n) something established for future generations
Numb (v) to make unable to feel properly or think clearly
Perpetual (adj) continuing forever in the same way
Saber (n) 佩剑
Prowess (n) outstanding skill or ability; expertise
Discussion Question
Let’s talk about video games, people say video games could make kids more creative, but Christian Belady didn’t agree, what’s you opinion?
Extra Exercise
1. Translate the following sentence into Chinese, ‘Give children boxes and throw away the toys, Belady pleads.’
2. In today’s skit, what were the boy building?
说明：
1.文本摘自《Advanced 彭蒙惠英语》，由chandler30亲自录入。更多节目可访www.studioclassroom.com
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