1 . Rave-on!

How about learning new skills on the guitar, drums and keyboard by video? Follow the touch-screen instructions to find lessons on each instrument, or search for a song to practise playing along to. Try our Professional Selection, with video clips of band members who will explain the techniques that make their recordings so individual.

Show-in-a-day!

Be a star singer or dancer for the day in a one-time-only special performance! Experts in international music and dance styles will train you, and costumes provided for the performance help create a really special, individual show. Get your friends and family to come and see you perform, as no videoing or photography is allowed.

Archived Images

Want to find out about a new band, or just want more information about an old favourite? Visit our collection to find out facts and figures, or see the actual possessions of famous bands and musicians you are interested in. You can actually get to touch things worn on stage at major rock and pop events, and there are plenty of other concert souvenirs.

Rhythm-studio

Get your body moving in the studio and learn to move to rhythms and sounds from the past to now, including Soul and Disco. Learn your steps from our professional onscreen dance instructor, then watch your performance and become the star in your own video recording which you can take away!

2 . “Two centuries ago, Lewis and Clark left St. Louis to explore the new lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase,” George W. Bush said, announcing his desire for a program to send men and women to Mars. They made that journey in the spirit of discovery. America has ventured forth into space for the same reasons.

Yet there are vital differences between Lewis and Clark’s expedition and a Mars mission. First, they were headed to a place where hundreds of thousands of people were already living. Second, they were certain to discover places and things of immediate value to the new nation. Third, their venture cost next to nothing by today’s standards. A Mars mission may be the single most expensive non-wartime undertaking in U.S. history.

Appealing as the thought of travel to Mars is, it does not mean the journey makes sense, even considering the human calling to explore. And Mars as a destination for people makes absolutely no sense with current technology.

Present systems for getting from Earth’s surface to low-Earth orbit are so fantastically expensive that merely launching the 1,000 tons or so of spacecraft and equipment a Mars mission would require could be accomplished only by cutting health-care benefits, education spending, or other important programs—or by raising taxes. Absent (缺乏)some remarkable discovery, astronauts, geologists, and biologists once on Mars could do little more than analyze rocks and feel awestruck (敬畏的) staring into the sky of another world. Yet rocks can be analyzed by automated probes without risk to human life, and at a tiny portion of the cost of sending people.

It is interesting to note that when President Bush unveiled (公开) his proposal, he listed these recent major achievements of space exploration: pictures of evidence of water on Mars, discovery of more than 100 planets outside our solar system, and study of the soil of Mars. All these accomplishments came from automated probes or automated space telescopes. Bush’s proposal, which calls for reprogramming some of NASA’s present budget into the Mars effort, might actually lead to a reduction in such unmanned science—the one aspect of space exploration that’s working really well.

Rather than spend hundreds of billions of dollars to hurl (投) tons toward Mars using current technology, why not take a decade or two or however much time is required researching new launch systems and advanced propulsion (推进力)? If new launch systems could put weight into orbit affordably, and advanced propulsion could speed up that long, slow transit (运输) to Mars, the dream of stepping onto the red planet might become reality. Mars will still be there when the technology is ready.

3 . Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people are ________ in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experienced ill fortune. I ________ notices in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.

Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my ________. Over the years I interviewed them, watched their lives and had them ________ various experiments.

I carried out a simple ________ to discover whether their differences in luck was due to differences in their ability to ________ opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had ________ placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying “Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50.”

This ________ took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to ________ it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

Unlucky people are generally more ________ than lucky people, and this anxiety affects their ability to notice the ________. As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to gatherings focused on finding their perfect partner and miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers ________ to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs.

Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there ________ just what they are looking for. My research eventually showed that lucky people create good fortune via four ________. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition (直觉), create self-fulfilling prophesies (预官) via positive expectations, and adopt a “never say die” attitude that ________ bad luck into good.

5 . Psychologists tell us our self-image defines what we believe we can and cannot do. Each of us over the years has built up belief about ourselves. Unconsciously, our pictures of who we are have been formed by past experiences. Our successes and failures, what others have told us and what we think people believe about us all help form impressions of what we think we are. Because self-image is so important in our growth, it is important to examine our concepts of self in order to reach our full potential.

Changing our self-image is possible. Some psychologists suggest we begin to change our self-image by mentally picturing ourselves performing well at some task. Since we presently react to things based on our present images, it’s suggested that we replace those with better ones. In many experiments, people were asked to sit quietly for a few minutes each day and imagine themselves doing well. For instance, subjects would sit and imagine themselves throwing darts at a bull’s-eye on a target. Over a period of weeks, their dart game improved. This has been done with people who wanted to play chess better, throw a ball more accurately, increase their salesmanship or musical talents, and improve many other skills. In most cases, remarkable improvement is made.

The point of changing self-image is not to develop an image of ourselves that is not real. To try to become something we really aren’t is just as wrong as living the unrealistic, inferior image we may have. The aim is to find the real self, to bring our mental images of ourselves in line with our true potential. However, it is generally accepted among psychologists that most of us fail to do justice to ourselves. We’re usually better than we think we are.

Another important part of changing self-image is to not think about past mistakes. Don’t let failures do harm. Our errors or humiliation over mistakes are necessary steps in learning. It is all right to make mistakes. But when they have taught us what we did wrong, we should forget them and not dwell on them. Sometimes we keep remembering our failures or mistakes and feel guilty or embarrassed about them. We let them take over, and then we develop a fear.

It is important to have realistic expectations of ourselves. Some of our dissatisfaction might come from expecting too much of ourselves. If we demand constant perfection in everything we do, we can be disappointed and our poor self-image will continue. If our goal is to reach perfection, we are doomed from the start.

7 . What if we had the power to control time, instead of moving from the past to the present to the future? What if we could jump and travel through time in a machine? What if we could go wherever and whenever we pleased?

The mysterious puzzle of time has kept people debating its nature for hundreds of years. Science fiction writers have turned it into imaginative stories. Some scientists have even attempted to explain it using math, trying to make the dream of time travel come true.

Albert Einstein said that time and space are one thing called “spacetime.” He said there are three dimensions in space: height, width and depth. A scientist named Hermann Minkowski added time as a fourth dimension.

Einstein introduced two ideas that have led to theories about the possibility of time travel. The first is relativity. The idea of relativity is that the force of gravity causes space to bend, which causes time to twist. The second idea focuses on special relativity. The idea is that a traveler moving super-fast through flat spacetime will enter the future. Einstein considered time “relative” because it is measured based on where we are on Earth or in space.

Stephen Hawking believes that a time machine will never be built. If it were possible, he thinks we would already know. If a time machine could be built, how come no one from the future has invaded us?

The first science fiction story with this theme is The Clock That Went Backward by Edward P. Mitchell, which was published in 1881. Since then, thousands of books, films and television shows have explored the idea of time travel, in which some tools such as phones, watches, photographs and old books take travelers backward and forward.

Will time travel ever happen? Who knows? Most important is to keep your eyes open and have a sense of wonder.

8 . Four things that you can’t miss in Macao

Macao Tower AJ Hackett Bungee Jump

The Macao Tower, 338 meters is the world’s 10th highest tower, with a variety of activities, such as gambling, eating and entertainment. One of the acclaimed activities is the bungee jump. The AJ Hackett Macao Tower Bungee Jump is 233 meters high, making it the highest commercial bungee jump in the world. Raise your arms and off you go! If you are not daring enough to jump that height, you can try the skywalk on the 57th floor ---it’s still remarkable.

Grabbing a traditional Portuguese dinner

Macao was colonized by Portugal before 1999. As a result, Portuguese culture is deeply immersed into many comers of Macao. Many Portuguese settled and opened Portuguese restaurants in the special administrative region, but the flavor is more adaptable to Chinese people.

Marking at the Ruins of St Paul

The Ruins of St. Paul is the significant landmark of Macao. The ruins consist of the St. Paul’s College and the Church of St Paul, built in 1583. However, after three intense fires in 1595, 1601 and 1835, the church was seriously damaged. It is beyond belief that after the vigorous cycles of rebuilding and fires, the huge surface and the front stairway remain unburned.

Visiting a museum

Macao, as a tiny city with only an area of 30.5 square kilometers, has 23 eye-catching museums. Due to its unique history, both eastern and western historical sites can be found. Many of them are preserved for cultural heritage, tourist spots or museum, such as the Grand Prix Museum, Maritime Museum and Wine Museum.

9 . Some people can walk into a room and instantly put everyone at ease. Others seem to make teeth clench and eyes roll no matter what they do. A small body of psychology research supports the idea that the way a person tends to make others feel is a consistent and measurable part of his personality. Researchers call it “effective presence.”

This concept was first described nearly 10 years ago in a study led by No ah Eisenkraft, a business professor at Washington University. He put business-school students into groups, had them register for all the same classes for a semester, and do every group project together. Then the members of each group rated how much every other member made them feel eight different emotions: stressed, bored, angry, sad, calm, relaxed, happy, and enthusiastic. The researchers found that a significant portion of group members ‘ emotions could be accounted for by the effective presence of their peers.

It seems that “our own way of being has an emotional signature.” says Elfenbein.

It’s been known for some time that emotions are infectious. But effective presence is an effect one has regardless of one’s own feelings—those with positive effective presence make other people feel good even if they personally are anxious or sad, and the opposite is true for those with negative effective presence

Unsurprisingly, people who consistently make others feel good are morn central to their social networks—in Elfenbein’s study, more of their classmate considered them to be friends. Sector Madrid, an organizational-behavior professor, has found that leaders with positive affective presence have teams that are better at sharing information, which leads to creativity. Inferiors are more likely to voice their ideas, too.

However, Elfenbein notes that positive effective presence isn’t naturally good. Psychopaths(精神变态者) are infamously charming and nay well use their positive effective presence for calculating ends. Neither is negative effective presence necessarily always a bad thing in a leader— think of a football coach yelling at the team at half time, motivating them to make a comeback. She suspects that effective presence is closely related to emotional intelligence which one can use to cure cancer or to be a criminal master mind.

10 . Each year, backed up by a growing anti-consumerist movement, people are using the holiday season to call on us all to shop less.

Driven by concerns about resource exhaustion, over recent years environmentalists have increasingly tamed their sight on our “consumer culture” with Groups such as The Story of Stuff and Bay Nothing New Day growing as a movement that increasingly blames all our ills on our desire to shop.

We clearly have a growing resource problem. The products we make, buy and use are often linked to the destruction of our water ways, biodiversity, climate and the land on which millions of people live, but to blame these issue on Christmas shoppers is misguided, and puts us in the old trap of blaming individuals for what is a systematic problem.

While we complain about environmental destruction over Christmas, environmentalists often forget what the holiday season actually means for many people. In fact, for most, rather than an add-on to an already heavy shopping year, Christmas is likely the only time of year they have the opportunity to spend on friends and family, or even just to buy the necessities needed for modern life.

This is particularly true for Boxing Day, often laughed at by ant i-consumerists the most. While we may look down on the queues in front of the shops, for many, those sales provide the chance to buy things they’ve needed all year. As journalist Neigh Phillips argued, “This is one of the few times of the year that people can even hope to afford such’ luxuries’ the Christmas presents their kids are asking for, or just an appliance that works.”

Indeed, the richest 7 % of people are responsible for 50% of greenhouse gas emissions. This becomes particularly harmful when you take into account of our consumption “problem” anyway. Why are environmentalists attacking these individuals, while ignoring people like Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who has his own f 1.5 bn yacht with a missile defense system?

Anyway, anti-consumerism has become a movement of wealthy people talking down to the working class about their life choice, while ignoring the real cause of our environmental problem. It is no wonder no one is changing their behavior— or that environmental destruction continued without becoming any less severe.