The Kentucky Derby is a horse race held annually in Louisville, Kentucky, United States on the first Saturday in May. Here are some helpful suggestions for your first trip to the Kentucky Derby!

Fashion vs. Comfort

    In many ways, the Kentucky Derby is the world's largest and most entertaining fashion show, with impressive hats and clothes! You'll be on your feet and walking a lot, so pack a pair of comfortable shoes to change into during the day.

Your Tickets

    You MUST have your tickets in order to get through the gates. Please note that the only place that has official permission to buy and resell Kentucky Derby tickets is the Kentucky Derby Ticket Exchange. Law enforcement officials will be on site to prevent people from selling tickets at a much higher price.

    If you have questions about your tickets in advance of the Derby, please call Churchill Downs customer service at 502-636-4400.

Finding Help

    With over 14,000 employees throughout the track on Derby day, you aren't too far from someone who can help. If you can't find an employee to help you, please text the word HORSE to 69050 and you will be placed in touch with Guest Services.

Safety & Security

    For the safety of all our guests, your bag may be searched by security. A number of items are forbidden from entering the facility(场所).

    For security and crowd control reasons, you can't enter the facility again after you get out. This means that you will not be able to go outside the gates to fetch items from your car once you have passed through security. Please be sure to bring everything you need.

    It is 6:00a.m.on the first day of the school year. In Chery brook Technology High School, mathematics teacher Eddie Woo is already at work.

    One of the first things before the first bell rings is to set up his tripod（三脚架）and iPad in the middle of the classroom. “I'm Mr. Woo. I record my lessons. I record all of them. In fact, I'm about to record this one,” he explains to his new maths class.

    He started posting videos online in 2012 for a student who was sick with cancer and missing a lot of school, so he started sharing them across the country and beyond. Wootube now has more than 38,000 subscribes(用户) and has attracted almost 4 million views worldwide.

    Cherybrook Technology High School principal(校长) Gary Johnson said Mr. Woo was helping maths teachers in Australia and making maths popular again. “He has an ability to simplify(简化) maths to a level where kids can really understand it.” Mr. Johnson said.

    12-year-old student Emily Shakespear said Mr. Woo's teaching style made maths easy and interesting. “I don't want to say it, but he sucked me into maths,” she said. Owen Potter, who attends high school in Cobar agreed. “It's difficult to understand how someone in Sydney can influence thousands of people across the whole country,” he said.

    Mr. Woo won the 2017 University of Sydney Young Alumni Award for Outstanding Achievement, and he was one of 12 Australian teachers honored at the Commonwealth Bank Teaching Awards.

    Australian electronics and homewares retailers are preparing for the invasion (涌入) of American giant Amazon, but some have decided to take the fight up to the online-based store when it comes to local shores.

    Last week, Amazon confirmed its rapid Australia expansion by announcing that it was searching for a site to build its “fulfillment center”—a large warehouse(仓库)for storing and shipping goods purchased online—but local retailer, including one of Harvey Norman's founders Gerry Harvey, have said they will make it hard for Amazon to succeed in Australia.

    Harvey Norman sells electronics, furniture and bedding—all markets in which Amazon hopes to hold a stake, but Harvey has said that he will happily go toe-to-toe with the American behemoth to hold his ground in the Australian market.

    “In America and other parts of the world, they have just demolished (彻底打败) other retailers, no question about that, and they send a lot of retailers broke,” Harvey told News Corp on Monday. “There is no question they have one ambition and like Attila the Hun, or Alexander the Great, they just want to demolish everything in front of them and then at the end of the day claim to be victorious and make their own rules. So this is a company that is extraordinary by any measure and challenges every rule that has ever been written about a business.”

    Some analysts have said that Amazon could take in as much as 3 billion U. S. dollars in sales in its first five years in Australia (around I percent of the total 225 billion U.S. dollar market), but Harvey has refuted those claims, saying that local retailers would be putting up “one hell of a fight” when Amazon launches is main retail services in Australia. “We will be over there fighting them like no American retailer has ever fought them,” he said. “Any price that they put we will beat or equal.”

    Meanwhile, Harvey's thoughts were backed up by the former CEO of supermarket chain Woolworths. Roger Corbett, who said Amazon would struggle to keep its lower wages and claims of lightning fast delivery to rural parts when it opens in Australia. “Amazon will have an impact on the market place, but they are coming into an already very competitive market,” he told News Corp.

    This is a time of year when high school students and their families are thinking hard about college. As seniors, juniors, and parents identify their top choices, discussions typically focus on the college itself. Is the institution small or large? How strong are the academics? What is the social life like? Do I like the campus? Such considerations are important, but they can cover the all­important question: Where will these college years lead?

    Applicants should think seriously about which college on their list can best prepare them for the real world. They should look for campuses that offer well­structured programs to help them form a direction for their lives and develop the capacity to take steps along that path.

    One of the most striking recent phenomena about college graduates in America has been the "boomerang" student: the young person who goes away to college, has a great experience, graduates, and then moves back home for a year or two to figure out what to do with his or her life. This pattern has left many graduates — and their families — wondering whether it makes sense to spend four or more years at college, often at great expense, and finish with no clear sense of who they are or what they want to do next.

    The trend points to one of the great shortcomings of many of our nation's leading colleges and universities. Structured opportunities to think about life after graduation are rare. The formal curriculum focuses almost universally on the academic disciplines of the arts and sciences.  Advising on how various majors connect to pathways into the workplace is typically haphazard (没有条理的). Career planning offices are often shorthanded and marginal (不重要的) to college life.

    It doesn't need to be this way, and in recent years some of the country's top colleges have enriched their academic offerings with opportunities for students to gain real­world experiences.

    We've all been there: in a lift, in line at the bank or on an airplane, surrounded by people who are, like us, deeply focused on their smartphones or, worse, struggling with the uncomfortable silence.

    What's the problem? It's possible that we all have compromised conversational intelligence. It's more likely that none of us start a conversation because it's awkward and challenging, or we think it's annoying and unnecessary. But the next time you find yourself among strangers, consider that small talk is worth the trouble. Experts say it's an invaluable social practice that results in big benefits.

    Dismissing small talk as unimportant is easy, but we can't forget that deep relationships wouldn't even exist if it weren't for casual conversation. Small talk is the grease(润滑剂) for social communication, says Bernardo Carducci, director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast. "Almost every great love story and each big business deal begins with small talk," he explains. "The key to successful small talk is learning how to connect with others, not just communicate with them."

    In a 2014 study, Elizabeth Dunn, associate professor of psychology at UBC, invited people on their way into a coffee shop. One group was asked to seek out an interaction(互动) with its waiter; the other, to speak only when necessary. The results showed that those who chatted with their server reported significantly higher positive feelings and a better coffee shop experience. "It's not that talking to the waiter is better than talking to your husband," says Dunn. "But interactions with peripheral(边缘的) members of our social network matter for our well-being also."

    Dunn believes that people who reach out to strangers feel a significantly greater sense of belonging, a bond with others. Carducci believes developing such a sense of belonging starts with small talk. "Small talk is the basis of good manners," he says.

We all know how it feels to get lost in a great book. But what's happening in our brains as we dive into it? How is it different from what happens as we experience real life? Now, a new study led by Dr Leila Wehbe and Dr Tom Mitehell of Carnegie Mellon University have provided partial answers to these questions. 

Since reading comprehension is a highly complex process, earlier studies tried to break that process down and focus on just one aspect at a time: mapping fMRI signatures（特征）associated with processing a single word or sentence, for example. "It's usually not like reading a book, and usually the stimulus（刺激物）consists of out-of-context sentences designed specifically for the experiment"

To address these issues, the researchers developed a computer program to look for patterns of brain activity that appeared when people read certain words, specific grammatical structures, particular characters" names and other aspects of the story—a total of 195 different "story features". In the study, they first asked eight volunteers to read Chapter 9 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and recorded their brain activity using an fMRI scanner（扫描仪）. Then the researchers fed the volunteers' fMRI data into their computer program and had the program identify the responses of different brain regions to the 195 features mentioned above. 

The result showed that when the volunteers read descriptions of physical movement in the story, there was significantly increased activity in the posterior temporal cortex, the region involved in perceiving real-world movement. Besides dialogue was specifically related with the right temporoparietal junction, a key area involved in imagining others thoughts and goals. "This is truly shocking for us as these regions aren't even considered to be part of the brain's language system," Wehbe says. 

Next, Wehbe and Mitchell hope to study how and why language processing can go wrong. "If we have a large enough amount of data", Wehbe says, "we could find the specific ways in which one brain—for example, the brain of a dyslexic（诵读困难的）person—is performing differently from other brains." And this, the researchers think, may someday help us design individually tailored（特制的）treatments for dyslexia and other reading disorders.