Make a five-minute film and win!

    Do you love the summer holidays but hate being bored? Then why don't you enter the Film Street Summer Shorts Competition by making a short film this summer with your family and friends?

What you have to do

    To enter the competition, you have to make a short film that around 5 minutes long (It can be shorter but not longer!) on a digital camera, or mobile phone.

Awards

    The best short film entered into our competition will be shown in Film Street's Cinema and you'll win a Cineworld Cinemas pass for yourself and there more for other members of your film crew. If you have a Cineworld Cinemas pass, you can watch as many films as you like for a year, for free, at any Cineworld Cinema!

Rules

.We can't show films that tell others about either your, or any other kids', name or address.

.We can't show films that hurt, harm or insult(侮辱） other people。

.We can't show films that have bad language.

Copyright Checklist

Getting permission to use someone else's work in your film can be expensive, so check your film to make sure that:

.Your film is original and you haven't copied someone else.

.There are no scenes of branding on shop signs, books, magazines or CDs.

.There are no scenes of someone else's artwork.

Address and Date

Post your finished film on tape, CD or DVD by Monday, October1st, 2007 to:

Unit 6,Third Floor, The Bond

180-182 Fazeley Street; Birmingham

    So what's stopping you? Start making your Film Street Summer Short now!

    Until late in the 20th century, most Americans spent time with people of generations. Now mid-aged Americans may not keep in touch with old people until they are old themselves. That's because we group people by age. We put our three-year-olds together in day-care center, our 13-year-olds in school and sports activities, and our 80-year-olds in senior-citizen homes. Why?

    We live away from the old for many reasons: young people sometimes avoid the old to get rid of fears for aging and dying. It is much harder to watch someone we love disappear before our eyes. Sometimes it's so hard that we stay away from the people who need us most.

    Fortunately, some of us have found our way to the old. And we have discovered that they often save the young.

    A reporter moved her family onto a block filled with old people. At first her children were disappointed. But the reporter baked banana bread for the neighbors and had her children deliver it and visit them. Soon the children had many new friends, with whom they shared food, stories and projects. “My children have never been less lonely,” the reporter said.

    The young, in turn, save the old. Once I was in a rest home when a visitor showed up with a baby. She was immediately surrounded. People who hadn't gotten out of bed in a week suddenly were ringing for a wheelchair. Even those who had seemed asleep wake up to watch the child. Babies have an astonishing power to comfort and cure.

    Grandparents are a special case. They give grandchildren a feeling of security and continuity. As my husband put it, “my grandparents gave me a deep sense that things would turn out right in the end.”

    Grandchildren speak of attention they don't get from worried parents. “My parents were always telling me to hurry up, and my grandparents told me to slow down,” one friend said. A teacher told me she can tell which pupils have relationships with grandparents: they are quieter, calmer, more trusting.

    Have you ever looked out of the window of a passenger plane from 30,000 feet at the vast expanses of empty ocean and uninhabited land, and wondered how people can have any major effect on the Earth? I have. It is now becoming pretty clear that we are causing a great deal of damage to the natural environment. And the planes which rush us in comfort to destinations around the globe, contribute to one of the biggest environmental problems that we face today— global warming.

    As usual, people in the developing world are having to deal with problems created mainly by those of us in developed countries. Beatrice Schell, a spokeswoman for the European Federation for Transport and Environment says that, "One person flying in an airplane for one hour is responsible for the same greenhouse gas emissions（排放）as a typical Bangladeshi in a whole year." And every year jet aircraft produce almost as much carbon dioxide as the entire African continent does.

    There is a way of offsetting(抵消) the carbon dioxide we produce when we travel by plane. A company called Future Forests offers a service which can relieve the guilty consciences of air travelers. The Future Forest website calculates the amount of CO₂ you are responsible for producing on your flight, and for a small fee will plant a number of trees which will absorb this CO₂.

    Yesterday I returned to Japan from England, and was happy to pay Future Forests 25 pounds to plant the 3 trees which balance my share of the CO₂ produced by my return flight. Now the only thing making me lose sleep is jet lag.

    Why Black Friday Shoppers Still Crowd Stores

    To many of us, the ideas of rushing out to a superstore the day after Thanksgiving is appealing. Why would anyone race to crowded stores when they could stay in with family, or watch college football? We can't say we know the answer for sure. But we do feel amazed at those who pour into stores looking for Black Friday bargains. Seemingly, nothing can stop them. Not the weather. Not the crowds. And not the fact that hurrying to a store in the age of instant e-commerce seems so…last century.

    To be sure, holiday shopping habits do appear to be shifting. The National Retail (零售) Federation has stopped breaking up its holiday sales numbers by whether they come from e-tail purchases or from physical stores. It's a pretty good sign that retailers don't want to bring further attention to the declining fortunes of brick-and-mortar stores.

    But there is no denying that people still love going to stores. Actual shopping in actual places remains an important part of the holiday ceremony for millions of Americans. To many, it's the difference between playing a sport and playing a video game. As commercial as stores may be, they are still places where actual human beings interact. In a store, the “courageous” shopper performs the approving act of finding a present. That item might be heavily promoted by the store, but it doesn't drop into one's cart. It is picked up and examined before a decision is made. Maybe it gets put back on the shelf when the shopper changes his or her mind. Maybe there is a conversation with a sales clerk. The process is not that different than it would have been decades ago.

    Online, the shopper has barely logged in before being faced with disturbing algorithmic (大数据的) suggestions based on earlier purchases. This hardly qualifies as shopping. This hardly qualifies as thinking.

    Perhaps we are reading too much into the Black Friday phenomenon. But we suspect one reason Black Friday remains is that it involves an act of resistance against the Internet age. That would hardly be unreasonable. There aren't many studies showing that time spent in stores is bad for one's health, while there are quite a few drawing a link between time spent online and depression. Perhaps the people crowding into stores aren't the crazy ones after all.

    A new officer with the Huntington Park Police patrols (巡逻) local parks 24 hours a day seven days a week. He doesn't need rest, coffee breaks, a salary or medical insurance, and that is because it is a Robocop.

    The main function of the Robocop is to scan and film the surroundings. Besides cameras with night vision that report 360 degrees, it also has a distress button which is located here, so if somebody is to need assistance or they want to contact the communication center, they can do it by way of that distress button. There are people that are monitoring on the other end.

    This newest police employee is self-charging. It's easy to program it and make changes to the software if necessary. Its maintenance (维护) costs are roughly 75 thousand dollars a year. It travels the entire park. It is a programmed path, but the police are able to change the path and adapt it.

    The Robocop can record the license plates (车牌) of passing cars and check them against an online database of stolen cars. It can also help locate a lost iPhone because it is able to determine a smartphone's MAC address. The police can see from the robot if something wrong happens and then come and figure it out.

    The Robocop can't replace its human handlers. The whole goal is to give police more time to do things machines can't do. The police have been having some concerns about safety of the parks and want an extra set of eyes that will help patrol a 24/7.Robocop's creators believe this model known as K5 is best used for providing security at public places like hospitals, parking lots, parks and airports. So far, it seems to be working out just fine.

Beethoven is a giant of classical music. And the most influential, too—at least, when it comes to piano compositions. That's according to a study in the journal EP J Data Science.

If you're wondering how data analysis could determine something as abstract as cultural influence, it's worth remembering this: Music is the most mathematical of the art form, a lot of which is symbolic. The music is written in symbols that are connected in time.

Juyong Park is a theoretical physicist in South Korea. Park and his colleagues collected 900 piano compositions by 19 composers from 1700 to 1910. Then they used that mathematical quality to their advantage by dividing each composition into what they called "code words", in other words, a chord. They then compared each chord to the chord or note that came after it, which allowed them to determine how creative composers were at coming up with novel transitions.

The composer with top marks for novelty was Rachmaninoff. But when the researchers looked at those chord transitions across all 19 composers, it was Beethoven who was most heavily borrowed from—meaning at least among the composers in this analysis, his influence was the largest.

Their study comes with some drawbacks. For example, the researchers only considered piano compositions in this work, and by only studying chord transitions, so their conclusions wouldn't relate to artists who were influential in other ways like Bach or Mozart. Park explained, "It's well understood that Mozart's contribution to music comes from the musical forms that he designed. That was not very well reflected by our mathematical modeling."

As for Park, the results convinced him he has some listening to do. "Of course I listen to music. I like Rachmaninoff's music, but I have to say I have listened to Beethoven way more than Rachmaninoff. So after this work came out, I ended up buying his whole complete collection.