Bees and Lego

The Cornell NanoScale Facility hosts the 11th annual FIRST Lego League Junior Expo, Jan. 28, 1-3:30 p.m. in Duffield Hall Atrium. It is free and open to the public, with free parking available in the Hoy Road Parking Garage.

This year’s theme, Creature Craze, focuses on the importance of honeybees and symbiosis. Twenty teams of kids, ages 6 to 9, have built Lego models showing an animal sharing a habitat with honeybees. Teams include students from Dryden Central Schools and Northeast, Fall Creek, Beverly J. Martin, Enfield and Caroline elementary schools.

Also featured: Hands-on children’s activities, robotics demonstrations by Ithaca High School’s FIRST Robotics Code Red team and the local FIRST Lego League Team; snacks and drinks; crafts and stomp rockets with Ithaca Sciencenter; and learning about snakes and birds of prey with the Cornell Herpetology Club and Cornell Raptor Club.

The expo is supported by the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility, the Society of Women Engineers and Shell Corp.

Cornell bound

“Bound for Glory” on WVBR-FM features live country blues Jan. 29 with Tal Naccarato in the Anabel Taylor Café. Admission is free for all ages.

The Sunday night concert series, now in its 50th season and hosted since 1967 by Phil Shapiro, M.A. ’69, features three sets of live music at 8:30, 9:30 and 10:30 p.m., with refreshments available. The program is broadcast live from 8-11 p.m. at 93.5 and 105.5 FM and on wvbr.com.

Upcoming performers include Peter Mulvey, making his “Bound for Glory” debut, Feb. 5; and father-and-son duo Beaucoup Blue, Feb. 12.

Starting Feb. 6, Shapiro leads beginning and intermediate group folk guitar lessons, an eight-week course presented by the Student Union Board in Willard Straight Hall, open to all.

Skin and space

Cornell Cinema begins a semesterlong series, “Skin,” Feb. 1 with Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life” (1959) and the 2016 drama “Moonlight” in Willard Straight Theatre. The 11-film series, in conjunction with the Society for the Humanities’ 2016-17 focal theme and related courses, includes a faculty panel Feb. 8 after “I Am Not Your Negro,” a new documentary based on the writings of James Baldwin.

Also showing: “All Governments Lie,” Jan. 31 at 7 p.m.; and Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science fiction epic, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” on the big screen Feb. 3-4. The Tompkins County Public Library is offering 30 free tickets to “2001” in connection with the exhibit “Ithaca Explores Human Origins.” Two more Kubrick classics, “Dr. Strangelove” and “A Clockwork Orange,” will be shown in March.

Dance workshops

The Cornell Hip Hop Collection’s Spring 2017 visiting scholar, Richard “Crazy Legs” Colon of the Rock Steady Crew, will lead a free, five-week dance workshop series for beginners Feb. 1-March 1 at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.

Workshop registration is open to all ages; all sessions are 7:30-9 p.m. Wednesdays. Lessons include the basics of breaking and other hip-hop dance styles and such topics as the origins and aesthetics of B-Boy/B-Girl culture and the broader history of hip-hop.

For information, email hiphopcollection@cornell.edu. Co-sponsors are the Department of Performing and Media Arts and the Cornell Hip Hop Collection (in Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections), with support from Ronni Lacroute ’66.

Rural studies panel

“The Future of Rural Studies as an Interdisciplinary Enterprise,” a panel discussion with leading social scientists contributing to “The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Studies” (2016), is Feb. 2 at 4 p.m. in 160 Mann Library. The Chats in the Stacks event is free and open to the public.

The bookexamines the organization and transformation of rural societies in developed regions. David L. Brown is the book’s co-editor, international professor of development sociology at Cornell and co-director of the Community and Regional Development Institute (CaRDI). He will be joined by CaRDI senior extension associate David Kay, M.S. ’93, and Kai Schafft, M.S. ’99, Ph.D. ’03, Ann Tickamyer and Leland Glenna, all of Penn State University.

The panel will discuss emerging challenges including demographic and economic changes in rural communities, food systems and land use, environmental issues, rising inequality and new social dynamics; and will consider the role of land-grant universities in ameliorating rural problems. 

Double the bass

The Cornell Concert Series welcomes double bassists Christian McBride and Edgar Meyer, who together explore previously unimagined possibilities for the instrument, Friday, Feb. 3, at 8 p.m. in Bailey Hall. Tickets ($24-$35 reserved, $15/$17 for students, plus fees) are available online.

Music Works International/Provided

Double bassists Christian McBride and Edgar Meyer are scheduled to perform Feb. 3 in Bailey Hall as part of the Cornell Concert Series.

After an impromptu concert in 2007, McBride and Meyer embarked on a stylistically diverse collaboration including new original music. McBride, a five-time Grammy Award winner who debuted as a teenager in the late 1980s, is a jazz superstar known to audiences for his infectious enthusiasm onstage. Meyer is famed for his technique and virtuosity, a genre-defying discography from Bach to folk, original compositions and his collaborations with, among others, Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor, Chris Thile, Béla Fleck, Joshua Bell and Emanuel Ax. The only bassist to receive the Avery Fisher Prize, Meyer also has a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and two Grammys.

Both artists will lead bass master classes, which are open to the public – McBride on Feb. 4, 10 a.m. to noon in 124 Lincoln Hall; and Meyer, Feb. 3, noon to 2 p.m. in Ithaca College’s Hockett Hall.

The Cornell Concert Series continues Feb. 23 with VIDA Guitar Quartet.

Schools of thought

Cornell scholars, local teachers and students discuss how schools can succeed by teaching students how to think rather than memorizing information, in a new documentary about education in America, “RE:Thinking,” screening Feb. 3-4 at Cinemapolis in downtown Ithaca.

Filmmakers Deborah Hoard, M.P.S. ’78, and Rachel Ferro followed three public schools over three years, including the Ithaca City School District’s Lehman Alternative Community School (LACS). The film was inspired by the work of systems thinking researchers Derek Cabrera, Ph.D. ’06, and Laura Cabrera ’93, M.P.A. ’95, Ph.D. ’98, of Cabrera Research Lab. Both are Cornell Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA) visiting lecturers and appear in the film.

Preview screenings are Feb. 3 at 7 p.m. and Feb. 4 at 2 p.m. Hoard and Ferro will lead Q&As after each screening, joined by the Cabreras and LACS eighth-grader Duffy Berkowitz on Saturday.

Hoard and the Cabreras are on the USDA-funded team that organized the Cornell Systems Thinking Symposium with CIPA in December, featuring TED-style talks. Hoard’s films include physics lecturer Robert Lieberman’s 2016 documentary, “Angkor Awakens.”