There is a lot going on in the world these days. From economic depression, to terrorist attacks, war, Sarah Palin and more, our news channels are plagued with so many examples of human horror and insanity that we often avoid those dreaded stations – opting, instead, for some memories of childhood on YTV, learning about the latest Jon & Kate scandal via TLC or watching some crazy divers get attacked by sharks on Discovery.  Many of us miss even the bare bones of world news.

As bad as this may be, there is now a fun, relevant way for us to view the world and some key issues from the comfort of YouTube!*

Auto-tune The News is a show that does just that. Auto-tune is a program that turns speech into Kayne-reminescent tunes and that, when combined with cleverly spliced news feeds from Fox, CNN, CBC and NBC, is both entertaining and informative!

Check out their latest “newcast” Nobel. Health care. United Nations. and subscribe! Your Social Studies teacher would be proud!

 [youtube LnoD3NUux3M]

*No YouTube channel will ever replace the dying breed of informative journalism… it’s a good try though!

Well, “the silence whistles” kinda makes sense, but isn’t stop motion just plain ridiculous?  Things cannot stop and move at the same time. Well, in the world of stop motion films or movies, that can happen.

What is Stop Motion? Simply put, it is an animation techniques also known as stop-action or frame-by-frame during which a physically manipulated object appears to move on its own. The object basically is being moved a small increment per frame, creating a somewhat choppy movie.

How can a stop motion film be made? The answer to this question really depends on what the artist wants. Traditionally, the stop motion film is made by shooting lots and lots of still pictures, creating a series of pictures that motionally relate to each other, and are joined together and played; it is like a flip book, which is quite time consuming to make. Stereoscopic stop-motion is what they call it. Coraline would be a movie made using that technique, although it is being played in 3D.

However, as technology advances, people get smarter and start to manipulate small motion changes using computers instead of using their hands to physically moving the objects, which is called go motion. Then, the ultimate computer generated imaginary creates the whole stop motion film using computer generated graphics, which is much faster, but can lose the sense created by traditional stop motion if  not used carefully.

Want to see it in practice? Here is a short film using the technique of stop motion, it is “The PEN Story”:

Hope you learned something about stop motion today. If you already know what stop motion is, I hope you really enjoyed the film.

Want to share your favorite stop motion movies with us? Post the link of the movie in the comment section!

Yes, I did. This extraordinary group from Korea trully puts on a show! Watch them jump, turn around, wave their arms, and open and close their jackets to put on and incredibly performance…Probably even better than the sport everyone came to watch…

Have you ever wanted to experience a different kind of Canada? Establish new friendships and global connections? Volunteer abroad? Check out this organization and what it has to say!

Canada World Youth (CWY) is a world leader in the development of international educational programs for youth aged 15 to 25. We work with countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe.

Since 1971, the CWY program has made it possible for more than 31 000 young people from 67 countries to have safe and meaningful international experiences, learn about other cultures, and contribute to the well-being of their own communities.

There are many ways for YOU to get involved. Tell a friend and be involved in something bigger than you will ever know. Volunteer for anywhere between 2 weeks – 6 months with other youth from around the world!

For those of us looking at post-secondary education, there are a great many things to be considered about each campus: the size, the architecture, residence, the cafeteria, and of course, proximity to mom.  But what many of us may not have been thinking about previously is the sustainability of a campus.

The College Sustainability Report Card has just been released for 2010, and includes 17 Canadian universities.  Among them, some local campuses:  the U of C and U of A. Each campus was rated in nine different categories which include student involvement, transportation, and food and recycling.

As you consider your future school, I recommend keeping sustainability in mind. Whether it’s just to know how your school is doing or to learn about ways you can get involved with sustainability on campus, it can’t hurt to be aware.

Missed the new episode of House, or just looking for some time to kill with quality entertainment? Well you may have not of known, but you can now watch your favourite television programs right here on the internet – legally of course!

Some good places to start are with the television networks themselves, such as CTV, TSN, or the Discovery Channel. The shows available to watch vary from site to site so you will have to look around if you are in search of a show in particular. A great place to start that search is at http://watch.ctv.ca/channels/ where they offer many different websites where you can watch a variety of television programs.

The downfall of this system of watching these full episodes online is that it sometimes takes a while for the newer episodes to be posted online, and that it does take a lot of bandwidth to watch these videos. So if you have a slow connection speed with your internet provider you may end up having to wait for your video to load for extended periods of time.

If you do not know where to start with your newly found opportunity of TV viewing pleasure, stay tuned for future posts, as I will be doing a series on some of the great TV programs which you may not have head of! Enjoy, and spread the word.

News stories these days have been getting crazier and crazier. First a man jumping into the lion cage, now a runaway boy making an escape in a balloon?

Falcon Heene was reported to the police by his parents, because they thought he had been on-board a homemade helium balloon that was left untethered and blew away.

Falcon (seen above after questioning from police) was found close to three hours later hiding in a box in the attic. His parents were relieved and promised to watch him closer.

However, his parents were featured on Wife Swap twice in March, and Falcon said that before, they told him, “You had said that we did this for a show.”

Could the Heene family be pulling everyone’s leg? Just doing this for attention? Police are still determining the facts, so watch the news for updates on Balloon Boy or click here for the full story!

Ever wanted to make a poster without the paper? Or make something completely your own to share with others? Or maybe just a visual aid for a presentation? Try making a Glog!

Glogster is a revolutionary way of expressing your mood, feelings and ideas, and it goes miles beyond text or video! Creating a Glog lets you express all those things you haven’t been able to describe by words. It opens the door to a whole new world of communication – just choose a background, throw in some shapes and characters from the galleries, add text, your own videos or photos and perhaps a pinch of music and there it is! In just a few minutes, you can make a digital poster, a colorful medley of ideas, reflecting your own special style.

Think this is something that you might be interested in? Register for an account or learn more by clicking here

Remember six-word memoirs? Well, I have something that’s the complete opposite of it: NaNoWriMo!

Now, I have no idea how you would pronounce that in its shortened form, but it stands for National Novel Writing Month. The point of it? To write a novel that’s 50 000 words long…in just one month! (Crazy? Maybe. Fun? Definitely!)

Starting on November 1st, writers from all around the world take part in this crazy, frustrating, pain in the rear challenge. (Trust me, I’ve tried it before. It was terrible. Horrendous. Nasty. But a lot of fun! 😀 Unfortunately I never made it to 50k. )

NaNoWriMo is basically a novel-writing program for anyone who has ever thought about writing a novel but never followed through with it. Now, since they’ve limited you to one month, the only thing that matters for this is quantity, NOT quality. This approach allows people to lower their expectations, take risks, write on the fly, and make mistakes. It is about freeing your writing and having fun with writing. Even the people behind NaNoWriMo themselves have acknowledged (on their About page) what your writing will be like for this quantitative challenge:

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap.

So there. 🙂 It’s okay to forget restrictions for this challenge! Just let the words flow. And they better flow, 50k words is equal to about 175 pages.

In 2007, there were over 100 000 participants, and more than 15 000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the end of the month. I’m not certain on their 2008 statistics, but I’m positive they’ve gone up since. How about making 2009 a record breaking year? Click here to sign up and participate in NaNoWriMo!

I cannot wait for November. Do you have any clue how long I have been waiting for these three CD’s to be released?

November 10th:

Faber Drive – Can’t Keep A Secret

If you’re a fan you should definately check out their myspace and listen to a few rough clips of new songs they posted. But while we’re waiting for the whole CD, let’s G-Get Up and Dance!

November 17th:

Forever The Sickest Kids – The Weekend Is Here

On the bands myspace, you can watch the countdown go down by seconds, while listening to their new song, She Likes (Bitter Sweet Love).

Hedley – The Show Must Go

Every Tuesday, Hedley is putting up a clip of a different song from their new album on their myspace.

Sleeping can cause a lot of stress for teens these days. Sometimes you go to bed, but you’re so stressed about getting your ever important “8-10 hours of sleep every day” that you can’t even get to sleep. Sometimes you get the right amount of slumber time, but you’re groggy and tired feeling in the morning anyways. Don’t worry, you’re not the only one.

Although 8-10 is the recommended time, it really differs per person. Some people only need 6 hours to function, while others need much more. The important thing is to make sleep a “daily” routine, and to figure out what works best for you.  It’s better to get 8 hours every night than to get 5 hours some nights and 13 others.

What’s more is that every night, we spend about 2 hours dreaming! That’s a lot of dreaming, and sometimes it can result in restless sleeping, or waking up confused down the hall after a sleepwalking episode. Because everyone has their own interpretation of dreams, I can’t exactly tell you much about them. No matter what they are, a reflection of memories, a way for your mind to prepare for the day to come, or a peek into a parallel universe, they definitely keep us amused (or terrified for that matter).

Wow, this is sure tiring. I better hit the sack. Sweet dreams! Don’t let the bed bugs bite!

It’s an undeniable fact that school requires a lot of reading. And the further in school you go, the more reading there is. While it might not initially seem like a major chunk of your 

 workload, reading all of your assigned pages can take a vast amount of time, and for someone who doesn’t read quickly, it may feel like a Herculean task. Fortunately, someone has developed a way to increase your reading speed and subsequently decrease the time you have to spend reading assignments, all of which leaves more hours in the day for the fun things that you want to do. Head over to Spreeder, paste in some text that you have to read, and start training your eyes and brain to move quickly. Maybe you’ll be able to finish that 1000 page book tonight after all!

Do you know that monkeys know how to cooperate and being fair?

Don’t think so?, check out the video below:

A pair of capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) show very compelling signs of cooperation and a sense of fairness, by working together to solve a problem using tools, and then sharing the reward.

They also show signs of understanding fairness: when unequal rewards are given to one monkey and not another, the monkey receiving the lesser treat would rather go hungry than accept anything less than an equal reward.

The token exchange from the latter half of the video is interesting in and of itself; I’m sure it took a lot of training. There is another example of its usage by the same experimenter here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=aAFQ5kUHPkY

Isn’t this amazing? I suppose if you understand the concept of evolution, this does not come at all as a surprise.