Prince Edward to lauch music festival

PRINCE Edward High School is set to launch a music festival bringing together various high schools to showcase different genres of music on April 1 with an official launch graced by the legendary Oliver Mtukudzi as guest of honour.

The event will be broadcast live on Power FM Zimbabwe.

THE Festival will be running under the theme, Creating Opportunity for Youth through Music, and it is expected to begin at 10am and ending 6pm. It will give a platform to the musical talent and excellence of Zimbabwean youths at high school level to display their skills in vocals and music instruments.

St John’s College, Churchill High School, Prince Edward School Old Boys (guest appearance), St Georges College, Heritage School, Watershed College, Prince Edward School and Tynwald Primary School will participate, according to festival co-ordinator, Elizabeth Phiri.

The school’s music department director, Elias Mapiye, said the festival will provide an opportunity for the pupils to have their music skills.

The Prince Edward School Jazz Band is set to take attendants on a trip down memory lane with music from the 1930s to the 1960s.

“the school had for many years churned out well-rounded young men, some of whom have become captains of industry, top sportspersons and
entertainers”,said  Elizabeth Phiri.

“This platform will not only provide an opportunity for one to showcase their talent, but it will also provide a challenge to improve and perfect one’s art,” he said.

She said the fiesta is going to be held annually to provide a platform for young musicians to advance their schooling and music talents.

“The Prince Edward High Schools Music Festival will become an annual event, which we hope to grow from year-to-year. It is the vision of the co-ordinating committee that future festivals will provide a platform for young musicians to further their education and musical talent by partnering, with universities that have music programmes at local, regional and international level,” she said.

HIFA 2017 THEME, DATES, AND MORE

”We are staging an intervention, we are coming in the midst of confusion and anxiety not only in our country but  all over the world and we are going to intervene,” said HIFA Director Maria Wilson at a press briefing on Wednesday.

The theme for this year’s edition of HIFA slated to run from May 2 – 7 is “HIFA 2017-Staging and Intervention,”speaking to the socio-economic problems that are bedeviling not only Zimbabwe nation but the world.

“HIFA 2017 is saying let’s stop being negative, and  let’s remember with joy and celebrate what it is to be Zimbabwean, so you are going to see a very different look for HIFA this year because we are saying enough and let’s look into the future,” she said.

HIFA is a 6-day annual festival and workshop programme that showcases the very best of local, regional and international arts and culture in a comprehensive festival programme of theatre,dance, music, circus, street performance, fashion, spoken word and visual arts. HIFA has come to be seen as an important symbol of something positive about Zimbabwe, unifying socially and culturally disparate groups of Zimbabweans at a time of ideological conflict and political uncertainty bringing huge audiences together to celebrate something positive – the healing and constructive capacity of the arts.

Since its inception in 1999, the Festival has received recognition for its support of arts and culture in Zimbabwe and is seen as a major contributor to development in this area. HIFA is now the largest cultural event in Zimbabwe and among the eight major festivals in Africa. HIFA has gained local and international media praise on many fronts, for example, Robert Grieg writing in the South Africa Sunday Independent -“The Harare International Festival of the Arts is probably the best organised festival in the sub-continent and one of the most manageably diverse. More importantly in the current socio-economic situation HIFA has come to be seen as an important symbol of something positive about Zimbabwe”.

Youth subcultures contributes to moral decline?

Youth culture is the way adolescents live, and the norms, values, and practices they share.Culture is the shared symbolic systems, and processes of maintaining and transforming those systems. Youth culture differs from the culture of older generations.

Elements of youth culture include beliefs, behaviors, styles, and interests. An emphasis on clothes, popular music, sports, vocabulary, and dating set adolescents apart from other age groups, giving them what many believe is a distinct culture of their own. Within youth culture, there are many distinct and constantly changing youth subcultures. These subcultures’ norms, values, behaviors, and styles vary widely, and may differ from the general youth culture. Understanding what adolescents think and do is fundamental to understanding the relationship between structure and agency, social patterns and individual action.

Does youth subcultures contribute to moral decline? Some researchers have noted the simultaneous rise in age segregation and adolescent adjustment problems such as suicide, delinquency, and premarital pregnancy. Perhaps the increased prevalence of age segregation contributed to the problems of modern youth, and these problems represent a difference in values. However, most evidence suggests that these youth problems are not a reflection of different morals held by younger generations. Multiple studies have found that most adolescents hold views that are similar to their parents.
If adolescents’ values are similar to their parents’, this raises the question of why adults insist that adolescents inhabit a separate world with different values. One reason may be that the similarities between adolescent and adult values are relatively invisible compared to the differences between these two groups. The way young people dress, the music they listen to, and their language are often more apparent than the values they hold. This may lead adults to overemphasize the differences between youth and other age groups .

In reality, sports, language, music, clothing and dating tend to be superficial ways of expressing autonomy—they can be adopted without compromising one’s beliefs or values.Of course, there are some areas in which adolescents’ assertion of autonomy can cause long-term consequences. These include behaviors involving substance use and sexual activity.
Peer influence can have a positive effect on adolescents’ well-being. For example, most teens report that their friends pressure them not to use drugs or engage in sexual activity.

With more researches being conducted this topic is still debatable.

What we expect with smart home technology this year

2016 was a year many would rather forget. From the social, economic  and tech world, it was a tough year.
But 2016 also had its share of important technological breakthroughs that changed how we live, work, and play. Virtual reality made a big comeback in 2016 and is sure to get even hotter this year. Virtual assistants moved out of our cell phones and into our homes, and smart home technologies may have finally broken through to the mainstream after years of trying.

So what do we expect in the new year? There’s a myriad of tech trends we’re watching that will change the world once again in 2017; here’s some of the advancements we expect might see with smart home technology.
#1 The Internet of Things has been on just about everybody’s list for years. So why hasn’t it caught on? The issue lies in interoperability. In theory, the IoT is supposed to connect all our devices together, making them sing in a glorious technological harmony. Thing is, we’re not at that point yet — at least in a usable manner, and in a way that doesn’t make you want to pull your hair out.We expect a technological breakthrough this year that will make smart home technology even more easier to adopt through IOT.

#2 Smart homes will soon become intelligent enough to distinguish between family members and guests within physical spaces and adapt to individual needs based on biometrics like fingerprints, body temperatures and even the rhythm of our own heartbeats?

We expect that as you walk through your home, a small device worn around the wrist will authenticate your identity by pairing itself to your specific heartbeat, allowing your home to automatically adjust the lighting, room temperature and play custom music based on personalized preferences and pre-configured profiles.

#3 We expect  Voice assistants (personal assistants) will become more commonplace, with many additional brands hitting the market. Technology may improve to incorporate multiple users and the specific lexicons required to interact with the devices will dissolve into more natural speech.

#4 Interacting with smart home, the cars infotainment system will become commonplace.

#5 We expect integration of  appliances with open platforms, such as Wink and Amazon Alexa.