For a 400-year-old art form, opera had a bad fame: overweight actresses singing the words which were hard to understand in one of those romance languages you were supposed to learn in high school. And with tickets costing as much as＄145 a performance, opera goers also had a certain appearance in people's mind: rich, well-dressed and old.

    But now opera companies around the country are loosening their ties and kicking off their shoes in an attempt to keep opera alive and take it to a younger and not so wealthy audience.

    Opera producers have found that to attract this crowd, they need to associate opera with common people. Because young people don't or won't come to the opera, companies are bringing the opera to them, giving performances in such unusual places as parks, libraries and public schools.

    The Houston Grand Opera's choice is the public library, where it performs “mobile operas”, shortened version(剧本) of child-friendly operas. This summer's production is Hansel &Gretel. By performing smaller versions of large productions, producers are able to make people interested while keeping costs at a reasonable level. The San Francisco Opera, which will be celebrating its 75^th anniversary this year, is staging Cinderella free of charge, keeping costs down by employing students from its Young Artists' Training Program.

    Robots and humans will soon be living in harmony(和睦).A singing robot is being taught to create jazz with a human in a project.

    Antonio Chella from Italy is working with a Telenoid robot. To start with, the Telenoid will be trained to follow the movements and simple sounds made by a human singer, and to connect music with different emotional states. Chella then plans to see if the robot can use these connections to create music.

    Intelligence is often regarded as the ability to find connections between the existing things. But Chella suggests that a conscious(有意识的) creature should be able to go a step further and introduce new connections that result in the creation of something new.

    Some jazz musicians say that they should have a mental library of musical phrases so that they are able to combine them in new ways. More importantly, however, this combination happens in a state that is similar in a sense to dreaming. Chella wants to copy these states in a machine.

    “This work raises interesting questions about the link between consciousness and music making,” says Philippe Pasquier, a musician and computer scientist. But he is skeptical about whether a robot musician needs a physical body.

    Pasquier argues that the robots are faced with two challenges(挑战). Software that can copy Bach has already been developed. But interpretation（演绎）includes human's different tastes and judgments. “What made the Beatles famous was not so much their works, but the fact that the interpretations of the works were wonderful,” he says.

    It is not yet clear how a robot would go about interpreting music in a new way. But by copying humans and then learning to sing, Chella's robot could provide clues.

    What seems to be important is that human composers often listen to lots of music made by others. So Chella's robot had better listen to those jazz standards first.

    Three-quarters of the world's coffee farms destroy forest habitat to grow coffee in the sun and typically use harmful pesticides (杀虫剂) and chemicals that poison the environment. When forests disappear, migratory (迁徙的) songbirds disappear, too. In order to deal with severe population and habitat loss, Smithsonian scientists created the Bird Friendly certification.

    Bird Friendly coffees are shade-grown, meaning the coffee is planted under trees, rather than on the land that has been cleared of all other plants. Coffee experts say shade-grown coffees taste better, because the beans ripen slower than coffee grown in the full sun, resulting in a richer, more complex flavor. Bird Friendly certified coffees grow under bio-diverse shade that provides habitat for migratory songbirds and other wildlife, stores carbon and fights climate change. Bird Friendly coffees are also certified organic, meaning they are grown without pesticides, which is better for people and for the planet.

    Bird Friendly producers can also earn more for their crops. The wood and fruit trees on shade coffee farms provide farmers with additional income. Every cup of Bird Friendly coffee purchased rewards these farmers with a little more money for being good stewards of the environment and encourages them to continue conserving Bird Friendly habitat.

    Buying Bird Friendly supports the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center's conservation research aimed at understanding and protecting your feathered friends. You can purchase Bird Friendly certified coffees around the world and protect wildlife and habitat with every cup. Find a store or cafe near you, or better yet, have it shipped to your door when you order online.

    The introduction of the iPad, with its touch screen technology, has allowed even very young children to take advantage of a computer. So what if all children in a school were given an iPad to use in class and take home with them?

    Anne Laure Bazin works in a school where every child, teacher and teaching assistant is given a free iPad to use in and out of lessons. For her, the main advantage of everyone having an iPad had been the improvement in communication. Documents can be emailed straight over to workmates during a meeting. Children submit their homework by email, or through the school's learning environment. Teachers now take the register (点名) using their iPad, which means that there is a record of which children are in school, and which classroom they are in.

    The use of iPad has encouraged greater sharing of resources among teacher. All communication with parents is now done by email. Working as a group in class is much easier as children can share documents. The whole class can look at one child's work by attaching (连接) the iPad to the whiteboard. If a child has forgotten the textbook, the teacher can take a photograph of the relevant (相关的) page and send it to the student in class.

    While the use of the iPad in schools has revolutionized (变革) the way children are taught, it hasn't completely replaced more traditional methods of teaching. Worksheets are still used in class as some children prefer the contact with paper. The children all have a textbook and exercise books. In Anne Laure's school, parents feared that the iPads would replace exercise books and children would lose handwriting skills. Anne Laure says, "The teacher are not ready to let go of the traditional style of teaching. We have welcomed the iPads in so much as they help communication and widen the resources available but we are not ready to let go of paper yet. The children themselves still value their exercise books and depend on them for review."

Summer reading

Finding Junie Kim

by Ellen Oh

Middle schooler Junie Kim is facing bullying (欺凌) at school, but she keeps quiet. Then, for a school project, Junie interviews her grandparents, who grew up in Korea during wartime in the 1950s. In their story of struggle, Junie finds the courage to speak up. The book will encourage any kid who has ever been in Junie's shoes.

Simon B. Rhymin'

by Dwayne Reed

Simon is starting fifth grade and wants everyone to call him Notorious D. O. G. because he wants to be a famous rapper (说唱歌手). But he's shy about using his voice to express his thoughts. When a teacher asks the class to give a talk, Simon must face his fears. Simon B. Rhymin' is a great book that will give confidence to readers who are going through similar struggles.

A Shot in the Arm!

by Don Brown

A Shot in the Arm! is a novel about the history of vaccines (疫苗). Readers learn how vaccines have been used throughout history to fight disease. The author also introduces people around the world who helped with the development of vaccines. A Shot in the Arm! is an exciting read that uses colorful drawings to pull the reader in.

The One Thing You'd Save

by Linda Sue Park

If your house were on fire, what one thing would you save? Writer Linda Sue Park explores different answers to this question in poems that show the different voices of a middle school class. Some choose baseball cards or toy animals. One picks a sweater that was passed down for generations. The book is illustrated (给……作插图) with black-and-white art. Readers of all ages will like this book. It helps you realize what matters most.

In 1991, Terry Gelber rented a stage at the Castillo Cultural Centre to perform his poetry. When asked by the booking agent what kind of poetry he wrote, his response was "Taxi Poetry".

While driving his taxi and reciting poetry, he noticed his taxi driver's licenses are also called "hack licenses". Then he thought for a moment and said, "Hack Poetry!" Thus "Hack Poetry" was born.

At the first reading of Hack Poetry, a fellow taxi driver and poet Tom Ostrowski joined Terry. The two cabbie poets read to an audience of six people plus one reporter from New York Magazine. Asked by Charles W. Bell of the New York Daily News what he called the growing group of taxi poets that appeared at readings, Gelber replied, "Did you see the movie Dead Poets Society?"

In 1992, a poetry contest was added and a television game show was produced for Manhattan TV. In the following years, Terry appeared as the Hack Poet at lots of events reading his Hack Poetry and writing poems for special days such as when an old taxi was put in the Museum of New York. After a successful business in 1999, the Hack Poet bought an old farm in the Catskill Mountains where he has been able to be close to nature and animals. Poets will be invited to share the loneliness of the hills in a place that thankfully has not quite moved into the 21st century.