Sing Tao Daily 23-04-2012

High-school students in Hong Kong awarded in the 3D computer animation international awards again.  Junior student of Shun Tak Fraternal Association Yung Yau College earlier participation in the 3^rd VAFi Croatia International Children and Youth Animation Festival Competition, the theme of transformation of the ”child” in Hong Kong lead them to got the runner-up in junior division. Judge of the competition from Serbia invited Mr. Chan Owen, animation director of the college to participate in the Seventh International Student Media Summit held in Belgrade, Serbia in August, they will become the only Chinese to participate. In addition, Chan said judge from Serbia is very appreciative of our students, has been able to master the 3D computer animation techniques, and they have personally written to invite them to attend the Seventh International Student Media Summit held in Serbia in August, and will be the sole representative of the identity of publicity of creative Media and learning outcomes of Hong Kong students, they can exchange the creative media culture with the team of the United States, Britain, Japan and other countries.

The Sun Daily 23-04-2012

Three Hong Kong students with a 3D animated short film ”friends” in the 3^rd VAFi International Children and Youth Animation Film Festival Competition, beating more than 30 sets of animation from Russia, Italy and other countries, won the second place in 11 to 14 international group. ”Friends” addicted to playing computer games in Hong Kong children is modeled, is about a boy from poor communication to the process out of the virtual world of dating.
Junior Students of Shun Tak Fraternal Association Yung Yau College Justin Mak, Chun Wai Yeung and Wai Kin Law in VAFi contest organized by the Croatian Film Board last week, with a film about two minutes of the 3D animated short film “friends”, was the second of the Junior Division. Because of their very good job, the school has been invited to participate in the Seventh International Student Media Summit held in Serbia in August; this is the first representative of China to be invited to attend.
The three students spent nearly six months to make this animation; Justin surprise to be award, this experience made ??him more confident of animation and will want to continue studying 3D animation courses in the future.

Wen Wei Daily 23-04-2012

3D computer animation school team of the Shun Tak Fraternal Association Yung Yau College after winning the International Animation Festival award in Croatia last year, this year gain another victory. In Croatia 3^rd International Children and Youth Animation Film Festival VAFi with the 3D animation ”friends” won second prize in the 11-year-old to 14-year-old international group.
“The 3^rd VAFi International Children and Youth Animation Film Festival held in local time on April 12 to 15, 2012. There are three groups in the competition – the primary group (age 10 or below), junior group (age 11 to 14) and senior group (age 15 to 18). This year, 23 countries and regions are participating with a total of 183 works. Yung Yau College submitted 10 entries, 7 works in middle and high school groups successfully nominated. Junior Students of Yung Yau College Justin Mak, Chun Wai Yeung and Wai Kin Law won the second prize in Junior (age 11 to 14) group. Their work”friends” described a boy from a wealthy family, and indulging in the gameworld, and poor communication. The boy is not happy about that, he hopes to go out to meet friends, but encountered trouble. They only got Merit Award from this work in last year animation competition in Hong Kong. They spent two months later modified to focus on optimizing the end of the story, and then submitted to the Croatian entry. During the race around the world, participants in the local theater to watch all the finalists can also participate in workshops and seminars organized a special trip from Japan to the local animator. Yung Yau College students have been arranged to stay with local families to understand the locals living culture.

My Home, My Dish

Afghan children line up for food distributed by UNICEF at Maslakh refugee camp, approximately 6 miles west of Herat in western Afghanistan. (Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images) Image source: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/opinion/afghanistan-health-food-10066.html

Author: Magda Wyszynska

I was thinking about what is good example of poverty. I cannot really tell you something new when it comes to this topic. We all know so many people starve in Africa. Sometimes people say: Oh, I overate. That meal was like one-week food consumption of Somalian kid. Another thing is health – we don’t think about it when we are in good shape. And when something is wrong – just call the doctor and walk for 5 minutes to the nearest drug store. Millions of people continuously suffer because of health-related problems that we can fix in couple of days in the western world. A home? Who doesn’t have one? Try to imagine survival without access to clean water. So my examples of poverty are commonly known, but recent. Just to remind you of the significance and the scale of the problem. More at our POVERTY page

Author: Tessy Troes

“The Human Race Will Be the Cancer of the Planet,

said Julian Huxley, the first general director of the UNESCO. This article will deal with some of the problems caused by humans: pollution and recycling.

Polluted Lake

Frank Schätzing‘s Bestseller, „The Swarm“, begins with a short story of a fisherman who disappears in the ocean off the coast of Peru. The last thing he sees before disappearing is a massive swarm of mackerels which attack him. In the meantime, similar events occur in Norway and Kanada – the ocean is striking back after years of human abuse. While the plot is of course fictional, pollution is a reality all over the world.

Dmitry Abramovic. Karega Omondi. Deependu Saxena. They all share the same problem: the lake where they live is polluted, since it is located next to industry. These people are also fictional, but there are real people who share their destiny. All three could have been real people who earned their living by fishing. They could have lived close to Lake Karachay in the 50s. Close to Lake Victoria in 2010. Or close to Poosaripalayam in 2011. Lake Karachay in Russia during the fifties became a dumping site for radioactive waste. Thousands of fish died in India in Lake Poosaripalayam because of effluents dumped by local factories into the water. And finally, Lake Victoria in Kenia was the terminus for all the runoff of surrounding farmland… More at our ENVIRONMENT page

Author: Pol Guardia

The first thing that we have to handle when we want to talk about Youth is INVISIBILITY. This is at the same time a need, but also a problem of Youth Discrimination. Youth discrimination doesn’t exist as a concept, it’s included in the general name ‘ageism’, which usually refers to the discrimination of the elderly. There are other terms and definitions such as Youth empowerment or Youth engagement, but they tend to be presented in the positive way, which is the direction in which we want to go.

A video about the Ageism campaign:

Even those activists who do recognise different ages in ageism, tend to be focused on children.

More at our YOUTH page

Author: Sarah-Jane Baur

The last article I wrote on the topic of discrimination was a general introduction to the topic. Now it is time to go a bit more into detail with the problem of discrimination and look at some personal stories of people, who have suffered from discrimination. The first story is on the topic of racial discrimination:

„My name is Nikola Bobann, I’m half Danish and half Bosnian. I want to write about an incident I had 3 years ago. I had just finished business college and was applying for this job in a big, well respected company. I had all the necessary diplomas and qualifications and was self-confident. So I delivered my application personally just to make a good impression.

More at our page DISCRIMINATION

Author: Pol Guardia

1. Who are Youth?

What is youth? What does it mean to be young? The most traditional definition – taken from Wikipedia – goes like this: “Youth is the time of life between childhood and adulthood (maturity)” (See the wikipedia article – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth), that is, between 12 and 24 years of age.

But, as you can imagine, there are a lot of aspects to consider about that but this is not place for talk about them; I just want to share another definition proposed by Robert F. Kennedy: “This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease”. And with that I want to excuse myself if some of the examples that I will give do not agree exactly with the age described and I also want to use it to clarify my first point: Youth represents an age, but it’s also, and mostly, an attitude. More on >>>

Author: Paulina Matuszewska

Ambiguous words, embarrassing gestures or comments – sexual harassment does not have to include touch or direct contact with the perpetrator. In fact, it includes every situation when the offender, wanting to satisfy his own sexual needs, consciously harms a victim, extorts submission in sexual sphere, intimidates, blackmails, manipulates. The biggest problem in that case is that victims, mostly women, are not always aware that they are being harassed and that they have a right to oppose it. Harassment can have a form of undesirable sexual interest (personal comments with implied sexual meaning), or discrimination with regard to gender affinity (humiliation, offence against representative of opposite gender). More on >>>

Author: Magda Wyszynska

Introduction

What do you think of when you hear the word poverty? No money? No food? No water? No humanity?

Every three and a half seconds one person dies due to hunger-related causes (1). About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live in absolute poverty today. That means they cannot afford basic needs such as clean water, nutrition, health care, education and shelter.

Millions experience relative poverty lacking a usual or socially acceptable level of resources or income as compared with others within a society or country (2).

Today, poverty reduction is a major goal and issue for many international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank.

Lack of Money

Poverty relates directly to the lack of money. In the image below you can see how it is spread around the globe. The map shows the percentage of population that earns less than 1,25$/1E  per day (2008). The most significantly affected countries are central and south Africa and southern Asia. This means that 20% of the world population is severely affected by poverty (3). More at >>>

What is health?

The definition of health is the level of functional or metabolic efficiency of a living being, which for us means the general condition of a person’s mind, body and spirit. Also, the maintenance and promotion of health is achieved through different combinations of physical, mental, and social well-being, together sometimes referred to as the ‘health triangle’.  It is proven that health is determined by and connected with personal lifestyles, the environment, health care organizations, and health policies.

Maintaining health is one of the key factors in living a long and high quality life. One of the most important things we can do to maintain our health is having a healthy lifestyle.First of all – getting enough exercise via sports activities can really lengthen your life span. At least 60min a day is enough to keep your body working as it should. For example, Dr. Mydin from Malaysia said that “Exercise is an important entity in sports medicine. As a start, we propose to bring in an expert on exercise who will explain how to optimize the human and genetic potential, towards greater endurance and strength.” This indicates how the general public can benefit from sports medicine. Also, getting enough sleep is more important than we think. Our body is under constant stress and like any machine it runs out of energy and needs to refill its batteries. We refill our batteries by sleeping and if we don’t sleep enough it won’t work properly. Many conditions, from exhaustion and stress to skin problems and gaining weight, can all be caused by the lack of sleep (the normal amount of sleep for an adult is considered to be between 8 and 10 hours). More at >>>

Media love strong headlines, and using eye-catching words like „crisis“. Currently two crises (caused by humans) are the favourite of media: the financial crisis – and the crisis of the environment.

There‘s no week passing by without articles about politicians making statements about CO2-emission or scientists presenting new statistics about fossil fuels. There comes that the majority of people are chased off and skip reading these articles. However, every one of us should care – like Albert Einstein said, environment „is everything that isn‘t me.“

Environment is our surroundings, from our family and friends to our house and our city to air, water, nature. All our acts have an influence on our environment – the studies of the interaction between a living organism and the environment are called ecology. The unity of living organisms and the non-living ones with which they interact is called an ecosystem. More at >>>