Young Singers prepare to perform in Utah

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Young Singers of the Palm Beaches is Palm Beach County's award-winning, community-based children's choir.

Comprising students from 104 schools, the choir rehearses at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts and performs twice a year on the main stage.

Recently, 15 students were selected through a competition to travel to Utah in February to sing alongside the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

"For a student to be selected for this competition in Utah is outstanding, said the choir's executive director Beth Clark. More than 3,000 kids auditioned for only 900 slots."

Students in grades 2 to 12 learn choral singing and vocal technique, posture, breathing, diction, vowel articulation, music reading and sight singing.

The repertoire is selected by artistic director D. Shawn Berry and every year the choir performs in an annual talent show.

Local students, Jocelyn Wood, 9, a fourth-grader at St. Ann Catholic School in West Palm Beach, and Hunter-Lynn Bhagwanden, 11, a fifth-grader at St. Luke Catholic School in Palm Springs, are "super excited" to be selected and to travel to Utah.

Jocelyn's mother, Nancy Wood, a pharmaceutical saleswoman, said, "Mr. Berry, the artistic director, is amazing. I give him a lot of credit. He works the students hard, but teaches them a lot."

"We're very honored that Jocelyn was selected," she said.

Milly Bhagwanden, Hunter-Lynn's mother, is also honored that her daughter was chosen to sing with the Tabernacle choir.

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Young Singers prepare to perform in Utah

We finally know why these mysterious 'Tjipetir blocks' are washing up on European beaches

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Beach visitors for years have wondered why rubber-like slabs, imprinted with the word "Tjipetir," were washing up on beaches throughout northern Europe.

But recently,the history of these blocks was uncoveredby British beachcomberTracy Williams. And it dates all the way back to submarine warfare of World War I.

Im not a historian, I just clean the beaches, she says. I do walk on the beach with my dog every day, and Im always absolutely intrigued by everything that washes up and where it comes from.

Back in 2012, she discovered her first Tjipetirblock during a beachside stroll inCornwall, England.

I took it home, and I googled the word 'Tjipetir,'and at that time there was hardly anything on the internet about it.It really just said it was a village in Indonesia, she says. So, she put it in her yard and forgot about it.

But just a few weekslater, on a different beach,she found the sameoddity this time, accompanied by bales of rubber.Finding one was understandable, but a second one turning up was quite odd.

Naturally, Williams got curious and decided to do some investigating.

Post by Tjipetir Mystery.

Turns out, Tjipetirwas the siteof a 19th century Indonesian rubber plantation. She also discovered the slabs aren't technically made ofrubber, but rather, most likely, something called gutta-percha, a substance that is yielded from a tree native to Malaysia and the Malay Peninsula. Because gutta-percha predates plastic, it was used for everything from teddy bears' noses to book bindings, hot air balloons,firemans hoses,and most commonly waterproof coating for submarine cables.

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We finally know why these mysterious 'Tjipetir blocks' are washing up on European beaches

Astronomy – Ch. 17: The Nature of Stars (19 of 35) UBV Photometry: Examples of Stars – Video

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Astronomy - Ch. 17: The Nature of Stars (19 of 35) UBV Photometry: Examples of Stars
Visit http://ilectureonline.com for more math and science lectures! In this video I will explain UBV photometry by using examples of Bellatrix, Regulus, Sirius, Megrez, Altair, Sun, Aldeberan,...

By: Michel van Biezen

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Astronomy - Ch. 17: The Nature of Stars (19 of 35) UBV Photometry: Examples of Stars - Video

Highlights of the Night Sky – December 2014 | Astronomy Space Science Video – Video

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Highlights of the Night Sky - December 2014 | Astronomy Space Science Video
More space news and info at: http://www.coconutsciencelab.com - what to look for in the night sky during December 2014. Please rate and comment, thanks! Credits: STScI.

By: CoconutScienceLab

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Highlights of the Night Sky - December 2014 | Astronomy Space Science Video - Video

Astronomy in Indigenous knowledge

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10 hours ago by Duane Hamacher, The Conversation Night sky over Lake Tyrrel in Western Victoria home of the Wergaia people. Credit: Alex Cherney, CC BY-NC-ND

Indigenous Australians have been developing complex knowledge systems for tens of thousands of years. These knowledge systems - which seek to understand, explain, and predict nature - are passed to successive generations through oral tradition.

As Ngarinyin elder David Bungal Mowaljarlai explains: "Everything under creation [] is represented in the ground and in the sky." For this reason, astronomy plays a significant role in these traditions.

Western science and Indigenous knowledge systems both try to make sense of the world around us but tend to be conceptualised rather differently. The origin of a natural feature may be explained the same in Indigenous knowledge systems and Western science, but are couched in very different languages.

A story recounted by Aunty Mavis Malbunka, a custodian of the Western Arrernte people of the Central Desert, tells how long ago in the Dreaming, a group of women took the form of stars and danced a corroboree (ceremony) in the Milky Way.

One of the women put her baby in a wooden basket (coolamon) and placed him on the edge of the Milky Way. As the women danced, the baby slipped off and came tumbling to Earth. When the baby and coolamon fell, they hit the ground, driving the rocks upward. The coolamon covered the baby, hiding him forever, and the baby's parents the Morning and Evening Stars continue to search for their lost child today.

If you look at the evening winter sky, you will see the falling coolamon in the sky, below the Milky Way, as the arch of stars in the Western constellation Corona Australis the Southern Crown.

The place where the baby fell is a ring-shaped mountain range 5km wide and 150m high. The Arrernte people call it Tnorala. It is the remnant of a giant crater that formed 142 million years ago, when a comet or asteroid struck the Earth, driving the rocks upward.

Predicting seasonal change

When the Pleiades star cluster rises just before the morning sun, it signifies the start of winter to the Pitjantjatjara people of the Central Desert and tells them that dingoes are breeding and will soon be giving birth to pups.

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STARS: North Wales Astronomy buff Brian Woosnam's tips for December

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North Wales Astronomy buff Brian Woosnam points to the skies again this December, fresh from a trip to the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Manchester.

Here is his guide for the night sky over the next month.

At this time, the southern and eastern sky are much as they have been later on autumn evenings, with the square of Pegasus high to the south, but little else in the way of bright constellations for now.

By 6pm however, Orion is beginning to haul over the eastern horizon, and mid-evenings southern sky will be filled by the striking winter groups.

The winter solstice is on the 21st at 23.03.

The planets

Venus will return to the evening night sky low in the southwestern twilight around an hour after sunset.

During the last week of December the planet Mercury will be just to its lower right but a lot fainter.

Mars will also be in the evening sky but setting in thewest around 19.30.

The bright planet Jupiter will be found in the east around 9pm between Cancer and Leo.

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STARS: North Wales Astronomy buff Brian Woosnam's tips for December

Astronomer Dr Lisa Harvey-Smith on the SKA project

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Data sender: Dr Lisa Harvey-Smith, CSIRO SKA Project Scientist, with new Square Kilometre Array which they are bidding for soon. Photo: Steven Siewert

Wi-Fi, advanced medical imaging and algorithms to detect skin cancer all have one thing in common they were all offshoots of astronomy, CSIRO astronomer Dr Lisa Harvey-Smith says.

While it may primarily be concerned with uncovering the mysteries of the universe, astronomyhas also led to many practical applications, Dr Harvey-Smith said ahead of a talk at the Australian Academy of Science on Tuesday.

Just for ASKAP we've got 72 terabytes per second of data streaming through the antennas.

Dr Harvey-Smith is a part of a team creating the $2 billion international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) billed as the world's largest and most powerful telescope bringing together more than one million separate radio detectors dotted across outback Western Australian and southern Africa.

The SKA telescope will be revolutionary for astronomers allowing them to study millions of galaxies through 10 billion years of cosmic history looking back in time as it reveals how galaxies were formed and challenges the fundamentals of gravity and Einstein's theory, Dr Harvey-Smith said.

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But if that wasn't enough, the unprecedented volume of "big data" it will produce at almost incomprehensible speeds will pose an "incredible challenge" for the software world and lead to spin-off technology for wider applications.

"There are lots of ways in which astronomy not only inspires people, but is actually touching their lives in terms of real technology," she said.

Dr Harvey-Smith is the project scientist for the $188 million Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) in Western Australia, one of several prototype telescopes built as a precursor to the SKA.

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Astronomer Dr Lisa Harvey-Smith on the SKA project

Will Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Nanotech, Synthetic Biology and Other Forms of Futuristic Technology Replace …

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(PRWEB) November 30, 2014

Future artificial intelligence that can autonomously create, re-write, and implement software simultaneously around the world is a unique historical factor in job displacement, says Jerome Glenn, CEO of The Millennium Project, and adds that, the Internet is also a historical factor in job creation. Information and means of production are far more open and distributed in the forthcoming biological and artificial intelligence revolutions than they were during the industrial revolution and the information revolution; hence, the frontiers for work may be greater than the information age revolution.

The Chairs of The Millennium Projects 50 Nodes around the world were asked to rate 19 potential global futures research studies as to their priority to be performed by the project. The future of work and income gaps was rated the most important. Long-term and large-scale strategies are needed locally, nationally, and globally to address the potential scope and spectrum of unemployment and income gaps in the foreseeable future due to the acceleration, globalization, and integration of technological capacities, population growth, and current economic assumptions, says Elizabeth Florescu, Director of Research of The Millennium Project.

The Pew Research Center found that leading experts are divided about whether future technology will replace more jobs than they create by 2025. The assumptions behind both of these potential futures should be identified, assessed, and explored in depth for their long-term implications and systematically discussed in workshops around the world, says Cornelia Daheim, Chair of the Millennium Projects Node in Germany and Head of International Projects at Z_punkt the Foresight Company. Individuals and institutions interested in being involved in this research are invited to contact the Project.

The Millennium Project is a global participatory think tank connecting 50 Nodes around the world that identify important long-range challenges and strategies, and initiate and conduct foresight studies, workshops, symposiums, and advanced training. Its mission is to improve thinking about the future and make it available through a variety of media for feedback to accumulate wisdom about the future for better decisions today. It produces the annual "State of the Future" reports, the "Futures Research Methodology" series, the Global Futures Intelligence System (GFIS), and special studies. Over 4,500 futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities have participated in The Millennium Projects research, since its inception, in 1991. The Millennium Project was selected among the top ten think tanks in the world for new ideas and paradigms by the 2013 University of Pennsylvanias GoTo Think Tank Index, and 2012 Computerworld Honors Laureate for its contributions to collective intelligence systems. The 2013-14 "State of the Future was named November 2014 Book of the Month by Global Foresight Books.

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Will Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Nanotech, Synthetic Biology and Other Forms of Futuristic Technology Replace ...

Robots, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Law Firms

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Home > Featured Posts > Robots, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Law Firms By LawFuel Editors on December 1, 2014

Ever imagined a robotic future for law firms a place where robots and artificial intelligence are in complete command and where lawyers as we know them are, well, almost irrelevant?

Well, imagine harder. Because that state of what has been described as structural collapse is coming according to a report on the future of the law.

The report,Civilisation 2030: The near future for law firms, by Jomati Consultants, predicts a future which for lawyers is right around the corner.

It looks at a world in which population growth is actually slowing, with peak humanity occurring as early as 2055, and ageing populations bringing a growth in demand for legal work on issues affecting older people, reports Legal Futures.

This could mean more advice needed by healthcare and specialist construction companies on the building and financing of hospitals, and on pension investment businesses, as well as financial and regulatory work around the demographic changes to come; more age-related litigation, IP battles between pharmaceutical companies, and around so-called geriatric-tech related IP.

The reports focus on the future of work contained the most disturbing findings for lawyers. Its main proposition is that AI is already close in 2014. It is no longer unrealistic to consider that workplace robots and their AI processing systems could reach the point of general production by 2030 after long incubation and experimentation, technology can suddenly race ahead at astonishing speed.

By this time, bots could be doing low-level knowledge economy work and soon much more. Eventually each bot would be able to do the work of a dozen low-level associates. They would not get tired. They would not seek advancement. They would not ask for pay rises. Process legal work would rapidly descend in cost.

Read more at Legal Futures

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Robots, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Law Firms

High school aerospace engineering program taking flight

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Students quietly worked in pairs, folding, cutting and gluing the colorful strips of tissue paper strewn across the half-dozen tables in the room.

What looked at first glance like an art class was actually Aerospace Engineering and Aviation Technology, part of a new Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics offering at DuVal High School in Prince Georges County.

Nearly 70 students, including 15 girls, are in the first class of the speciality program, which was created to encourage more students to embrace the study of science and technology and prepare them for careers in the high-demand fields.

Its a real good opportunity, said Jada Williams, 14, adding that she likes building things and has a strong interest in becoming a pilot. It will look good on the rsum.

NASA and the College Park Aviation Museum both located within minutes of the school are serving as partners and helping expose students to career options they otherwise might not consider.

Segun C. Eubanks, chairman of the Prince Georges County School Board, said the program at DuVal is much like other career academies that have opened across the county, part of an ongoing effort by the school system to expose students to careers and prepare them for college.

Rather than just explain to them why they need algebra skills in the ninth grade, this shows them, Eubanks said. They have the experience to delve into a career and get some hands-on work.

Eubanks, who is the director of teacher quality for the National Education Association, said he looks forward to an expansion of such academies into other fields, including education. The aerospace program is a good start for us, and were going to keep it going, he said.

The academies, which began in Prince Georges three years ago, are considered an essential component of the countys secondary school reform. The county has opened 36 career-focused academies, offering 12 career options to 3,400 students who participated in the specialty programs last year. Students are studying everything from information technology to health and bioscience.

But unlike peers in the career academies, the students in the aerospace and aviation program had to test into it, which makes it more similar to the school districts other science and technology programs. Plans call for the program to add 100 students each year, with current students serving as mentors to those joining the program.

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High school aerospace engineering program taking flight

Sac State releases new programs in history and philosophy of science

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Sacramento State joined the ranks of top universities offering History and Philosophy of Science programs this fall. The initiative that launched in fall 2014 is expected to achieve official curricular program status by the end of the academic year.

The Center for Philosophy and Natural Sciences, in connection with the College of Natural Science and Mathematics at Sac State and the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Athens, Greece, participates in research and scholarships to contribute to a bridge that scientific and philosophical concepts that may not only be cross-joined but mutually supported.

The idea is to take faculty research and channel it into stuff for students. Said Michael Epperson, founding director of CPNS and research professor. The culture here generally is nobody really does much research. Everyone in humanities just focuses on teaching and this is a way of breaking down the inaccurate view of what happens at Sac State. There are lots of people doing research at Sac State and what we want to do is take that research and connect it with what students need and what they are interested in.

Sac State's initiative includes two new courses offered in the Department of History. The first is the history of physical science (HIST 107) which is the study of the conceptual foundations of modern physics. This includes the special and general theories of relativity and the latest interpretations of quantum mechanics. The course will trace the evolution of the origins of natural philosophy up to present day.

The second course is The History of Ancient Sciences, which will be available in spring semester. The course is an examination of the historical foundations and evolution of ancient science, from the natural philosophy of the Presocratics to post-Aristotelian thought. The course is taught with an emphasis on issues relating to Greek physics, medicine, and mathematics.

Other courses that will be available include: history of medieval and early modern science, history of modern science from the 17th century to the present, gender issues in science and technology amongst others.

Lori Banker, sociology major and a student in Eppersons HIST 107 course said Im loving the class. From a student who has never taken a science class and Im learning about the history of science. Now when people say its scientific I know it doesnt mean anything.

Other aspects of the program include a visiting scholar from NASA, a faculty-moderated student discussion group and a series of guest speakers.

The most recent guest speaker is Timothy Eastman, Physicist from NASA. Eastman spoke about the Cosmic Agnosticism: Alternative Perspectives on Cosmology.

My punchline is whenever you get into a complex topic like this do your own research, do your own investigations and think for yourself. Said Eastman

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Sac State releases new programs in history and philosophy of science