On Sunday, May 20, a spectacular astronomical phenomenon will occur when our moon passes between the Earth and the sun. The result for the luckiest of viewers will be an annular (or ring-shaped) solar eclipse. Many others will gladly “settle” for the similarly beautiful partial eclipse.

[More from Mashable: 7 Things You Need to Know About Saturday’s SpaceX Launch]

This type of eclipse occurs less than once a year, but even then it only appears geographically for those in its trajectory. Tecca reports the eclipse will appear full for viewers in locations including Tokyo, Redding, Calif., central Nevada, southern Utah, northern Arizona, and Albuquerque, N.M.

Other locations in the Western United States and Canada and parts of the Pacific will see the partial eclipse. If you’re in the Western U.S., the eclipse will begin on Sunday at around 6:30 P.M. PDT.

[More from Mashable: 11 Top Celebs to Follow on Viddy]

At Mashable, we love to see these amazing events, but we especially love seeing them through your eyes. Most recently, we asked you to send us photos of the “supermoon,” and the results were stunning. Now, we want you to send us your photos of the annular eclipse. Simply drag your photo to the widget below, or tweet them with the hashtag #MashEclipse.

Before you get started, make sure you look at Space.com’s guide to safely photographing the eclipse. We’re looking forward to seeing your best shots!

This story originally published on Mashable here.

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Classroom training isn’t dead, but it also isn’t the answer for every training need. Social tools are changing the game when it comes to employee learning. Organizations can create collaborative workplaces where employees can learn from each other instead of only learning in a formal setting or from the proverbial “company expert.”

[More from Mashable: Which TV Shows Are Getting the Most Social Buzz During Finales Week?]

For training programs to be effective, companies must use the right methods and medium for their training sessions and their audience. Given the popularity of social media, it only seems logical to explore how social media tools can have a positive impact on the learning experience.

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What It Means

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Tony Bingham, president and CEO of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), defines social learning as “learning that happens outside a formal structure or classroom and is really the way people have always learned from each other. Social learning centers on information sharing, collaboration and co-creation.”

[More from Mashable: 7 Things You Need to Know About Saturday’s SpaceX Launch]

While the practice of social learning has been around for ages, we need a better definition of it for today’s workplace. Most of us have a vision for what formal classroom training looks like, so here’s one way to view the basic difference between informal learning and social learning:

• Informal learning is a term used to describe anything not learned in a formal program or class. It can take place within groups or alone using activities such as reading or search.
• Social learning is learning with and from others. It happens at conferences, cafes or online — with or without social media tools.

In the book Social Media at Work, written by Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr and Mary Ellen Kassotakis, the authors share case studies of companies using social and informal learning for business success. For example, Oracle uses a key tool called Connect to give employees the information they need at the moment they need it. The tool is about more than just answering questions -– it’s teaching people how to make smart decisions about the business.

One thing is certain about social learning: It’s not a replacement for traditional classroom training. “There will always be some kinds of training that must be done in a classroom setting because of the requirements of the training or skill mastery demands,” Bingham explains. “Examples include certification, compliance, and deep learning -– this is happening in the classroom.”

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Social Learning Benefits

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Surveys of CEOs continue to report that recruiting and developing talent are their top concerns. In addition, ASTD Research notes that by 2020, nearly half (46%) of all U.S. workers will be Millennials.

Organizations have to gain an understanding of how a new generation of workers likes to learn, how they use technology and their preferred means of communication. This will be essential in creating training curriculum, development programs and succession plans.

Bingham says it’s possible to calculate the return on social learning, but it’s not the traditional return-on-investment (ROI) formula: “It requires alignment to what’s important to the organization, and often that includes retaining institutional knowledge, solving complex problems collaboratively and attracting people to your organization.”

Maria Ogneva, director of community at Yammer, says, “If your goal is to increase customer satisfaction, perhaps the impact metric you are looking for is the increase of speed of a response to a customer, and how collaboration helps you do that. For any social effort to be successful, it has to tie to a business objective.”

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Barriers to Social Learning

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Business leaders need to realize that employees are already using social tools -– whether it’s approved or not. Instead of prohibiting the use of social media, savvy business leaders should harness its power to drive business results. Bingham notes, “It’s important to make the distinction between a management problem and a technology problem. Most often, problems that occur with the use of social media are management problems.”

Bingham adds that he sees a concern that the use of social media tools may compromise proprietary informaion, or that issues related to intellectual property, company secrets or business strategy may be divulged by a workforce given social media tools. His recommendation?

“Organizations should have an intellectual property policy in place that outlines clear expectations -– and consequences for inappropriate activity. This policy should consider the multitude of possibilities for the use of an organization’s intellectual property.”

Once guidelines are in place, clearly communicate those throughout the entire organization. The goal isn’t to create obstacles to learning but a respectful, effective means to using social tools.

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Implementing Social Learning within Your Organization

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Before rolling-out a social learning strategy, take a good look at your company culture. Determine if the company is ready to incorporate social learning into its training and development strategy. Adding social just because it sounds cool isn’t productive for the workforce.

Any time a company is testing the new territory, it’s beneficial to start small. Find a program or an initiative that would be well-served by employing social technologies and let the people involved with it experiment and find what works. “Social learning has an organic nature to it, it can’t be forced,” Bingham says.

After using a new technology, evaluate the success of the program. Get feedback on three levels:

• From the participants who used the social tool. How did it help or hinder the learning experience?
• From the administrators of the social tool. Was it easy or difficult to use, explain to others and get participant involvement?
• From the management team. What was their perception of the results gained from using a social tool within their work teams?

This feedback will help refine the best social learning methods to incorporate for future activities.

Social media platforms will continue to develop and evolve. More and more individuals will start using them for their personal brands and professional lives. Employees will demand simplicity and expect workplace training to incorporate the tools they use on a regular basis.

Would you like to see more social in your training programs? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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More Small Business Resources From OPEN Forum:

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- Should Small Businesses Follow Everyone Back on Twitter?
- Are You Falling into the Pricing Trap?
- How to Take Your PR Pitches to the Next Level

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Spectral Instruments may be a small company, but it has already designed several impressive cameras, including one called 1110 series that can capture the stars and the sun even in the middle of the day. The company’s products have been designed for use by research facilities and spacecraft. But this time, its employees hope to create a custom-made version of the super high-tech 1110 series that can be used by photographers on Earth.

The 1110 series is a 112-megapixel camera with ultra light-sensitive sensors that enable it to take noiseless black and white images. The employees plan to downsize the camera (it’s pretty big, as you can see in the video below) and have a professional photographer try it out during a photo shoot.

Before the employees can start, though, they still have to convince the company’s management that the project is worth its hefty price tag by gauging people’s interest on the project over the internet. And that would’ve been a much easier task if they released sample pictures to show what the camera can do. Nevertheless, if you want to help them get the response they need, spread the word by tweeting or posting about the project on Facebook and other social networking sites.

[via ESO]

(Source)

This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca

More from Tecca:

It’s Friday again — hooray! Time to make plans for  the weekend over a few bottles of beer like the man in the video above. But while you probably use a bottle opener to get to your fizzy liquor, this man uses something far more dangerous: a chainsaw.

This video was uploaded to YouTube by a user named Reborious with a sarcastic caption that reads: “You can open a beer with a fork? That’s nice…” Let’s face it — this man is right up there with people who open bottles with their teeth. But while his mad beer opening skills can make anyone feel inadequate, we’d like to warn you against trying this at home. Opening a bottle with a fork should be cool enough for most people; there’s no need to risk the safety of your limbs.

(Source)

This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca

More from Tecca:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Securities and Exchange Commission will review the Nasdaq trading glitches surrounding the initial public offering of Facebook Inc on Friday, an agency spokesman said.

“As is our practice, staff will review the incident with Nasdaq to determine its cause and steps that will be taken to address it,” SEC spokesman John Nester said in a statement.

(Reporting By Dave Clarke; Editing by Gary Hill)

(Reuters) – Individual investors were left in the dark for hours on Friday about whether their buy and sell orders for newly issued Facebook shares had actually been executed, in the latest of a series high-profile exchange glitches in recent years.

Massive demand for the social networking giant’s initial public offering, which set a trading volume record for U.S. market debuts, led to a 45-minute delay in the start of trading in the stock. But it was what happened after trading started that had some on Wall Street fuming.

The Nasdaq Stock Market, where Facebook is listed, had problems sending electronic messages back to the brokerages that handle orders from individual, or “retail,” investors, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

Because the electronic acknowledgements didn’t come back from the exchange, the brokers were unable to tell their clients that trades had been executed. Such acknowledgements usually occur almost instantaneously. The delay meant that, in one of the most anticipated stock offerings ever, frustrated brokers and investors didn’t know if orders had actually gone through.

“Nasdaq’s delay in passing back executions is causing a lot of heartburn on the Street,” said one source. “We had to tell clients we didn’t get the print back,” said another.

Nasdaq officials did not return repeated calls for comment. In a note to traders, the exchange operator, Nasdaq OMX Group, said at 1:57 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time that trade execution messages were finally delivered to brokers and market makers. The stock started trading about 11:30 a.m.

Later the exchange said it intended to reach a resolution on orders entered from 11 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. ET through an “offline matching process.”

FLYING BLIND

Some traders said they were still not getting confirmations toward the end of the trading day.

“We’re flying completely blind,” said an East Coast-based Morgan Stanley Smith Barney broker who had put in more than 30 orders for clients over the course of the day, including a few before the opening bell.

As of 3:15 p.m., Nasdaq had only confirmed that just a few very small trades had gone through, said the broker, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak, under Morgan Stanley‘s rules.

Around the same time, some brokers at Raymond James & Associates, the brokerage arm of Raymond James Financial, still had not received confirmations on all of their pre-IPO orders that were at or above $42 a share, said one broker, who declined to be identified because he was not permitted to speak to the press.

“We have seen these kinds of things happen in crazy markets, but not when it’s just crazy with one individual security,” the broker said.

A Bank of America Merrill Lynch broker, however, said he had no problems whatsoever in the process.

The end result was confusion that lingered after the close of trading.

“There are massive problems here that are going to require the Street to spend a significant amount of time to clean up, particularly the market makers and the order-sending firms,” said one of the sources, who requested anonymity.

After the market closed, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it would review the trading glitches surrounding Facebook’s debut.

MARKET GLITCHES

Investor confidence in the equity markets, where trading is largely computer-driven, has wavered since the “flash crash” in May 2010 when $1 trillion in shareholder equity was temporarily wiped out in a matter of minutes.

In March, the botched IPO of BATS Global Markets, the third-largest U.S. stock exchange, refocused attention on the potential for marketplace mishaps. A series of unforeseen glitches hit the company’s market debut on its own exchange and caused it to take the extremely rare step of withdrawing its IPO.

The debacle also led to a fouled trade in shares of Apple Inc and caused a temporary halt in the stock.

When data-mining software maker Splunk went public on Nasdaq on April 19, it was very well-received and its shares soared, tripping a circuit breaker that temporarily halted the stock, but its shares continued trading on NYSE Arca during the halt, and those trades had to be canceled.

Just last Thursday, the IPO of Andina Acquisition Corp, a small Nasdaq-listed company, went awry and a batch of trades had to be canceled.

The next day, Nasdaq ran the first of four days of tests on its IPO systems in the week leading up to the Facebook’s debut.

“They were trying to beef up their equipment in anticipation of this so they need to continue to invest in their equipment because it’s a little unsettling when market structure doesn’t function correctly,” said Stephen Massocca, managing director at Wedbush Morgan, a broker in San Francisco.

STOCK ENDS NEARLY FLAT

The day started with a burst of activity, with 83 million Facebook shares crossing the tape in the first minute of trading. After that, volume naturally declined, but investors said some traders might have backed away due to the lack of news on executions from Nasdaq.

As the share price dipped to $38, where Facebook was initially priced, volume ticked up. Traders cited support from underwriters, including lead underwriter Morgan Stanley, as the stock neared the floor.

It was possible that the Nasdaq’s problems were behind the price movement, said one of the sources. “There was definitely some uncertainty around the open because people didn’t have their positions,” the source said.

Facebook shares did not fall below the IPO price of $38 and closed at $38.23.

(Additional reporting by David Gaffen, Jennifer Cummings, Jessica Toonkel, and Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Alwyn Scott, Gary Hill)