Banking in the World of Fungi

Since my last post on April 7, about how I extracted the DNA from the specimens and prepared it to be sequenced, I have sent the samples off to be sequenced by Macrogen. Four of the five samples were able to be sequenced, which is good odds given that it was my first time doing the procedure and that some of the fungi were older. I knew that four of them worked, because after receiving the sequences online, I downloaded the sequences from Macrogen and used the website Nucleotide BLAST® (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), a part of GenBank®, to compare our sequence to others that had already been uploaded to GenBank®. Nucleotide BLAST® gives a match with sequences that had already been uploaded. If there is a 98-100% match with a them, then we could safely say that they were the same species.

Something interesting happened when we tried to identify the veiled polypore, or popcorn conk. We searched for it on Nucleotide BLAST®, but the closest sequence match in Nucleotide BLAST® said that it was a totally different fungus, even though it was known that it was the veiled polypore, or popcorn fungus. It was confusing until we found out that GenBank® had not had any submissions of this fungus in that particular gene region, the ITS region. This is interesting because the popcorn conk is very common, so it is surprising that no one had uploaded a submission.

Therefore, three new submissions were uploaded and they should be of use to many people. I now have my name on a GenBank® submission, which I never expected to happen.

~Patrick

Presenting, Performing, Practice, Panic, and Popper

After such a self-deprecating first blog post, I’ve got just a few days left to finish up my project (within the time I’ve allotted myself), and while I’m sure I would be a little more relaxed right now if I had managed my time better from the start, I’m feeling better with each completed task.

But anyway, I really don’t want to spend another post just talking about whether or not I’m caught up; I would like to talk about another issue I’ve encountered in the process of this ELI, however. From the get-go I knew that I wanted to include a cello performance in my final presentation, because what’s a music ELI without music? My initial goal was to polish the piece Hungarian Rhapsody by David Popper and to perform it in its entirety during my presentation. The Rhapsody is a very cool piece and it’s a lot of fun both to listen to and to play, but… it’s hard. With a lot of diligence and no small thanks to my cello teacher, I can play all of it by now, but I don’t think I can say that I would have a very good chance of keeping it totally smooth if I tried to perform it beginning to end at this point. (And with all of you to impress!)

But I don’t want to let my final presentation go by with scarcely a slipping interval reaching your auditory cortices just because of a few pesky harmonic double stops.

I want to be able to demonstrate what I’ve learned and how much fun I’ve had learning it this year, even if it’s not perfect. I also want to use the best example possible of the concepts I’ll be discussing elsewhere in my presentation, including music in physics, neuroscience, and culture as well as basic music theory. I want people to be engaged and to make connections between what I talk about and what I play, and I want to show off a little bit.

I resolved at first to talk briefly about certain concepts and then to demonstrate each one with a short section from the piece that tied into what I was explaining, but then I realized that this really wouldn’t show my audience anything about what it’s like to have all of this work come together as a musician. My new plan is to find a good chunk of the piece that I feel confident playing and that gives good examples of a lot of different things that I’ve studied this semester, and to play that chunk with an explanation of what you’ll be hearing first. I think it’ll be a great way to pull everything together, and Ms. Wissner might be my piano accompanist, so I’m excited to see how it all works out.

The problem now is finding a cute outfit that can accommodate my cello.

~Clare

Landscaping the Hole in Our School

We have all seen it: that gaping hole in the middle of the school that everyone refers to as the outdoor commons. It has the potential to become an interesting, purposeful area that could be of use to the student body, yet it remains, for the most part, unused. I selected the lower outdoor commons to create a landscape design for because of its purposelessness and apparent lack of visual appeal. My goals in creating plans for the entire lower outdoor commons was to make it seem more unified, give a direction for any future changes made to the commons, and create interest to draw more people down to the unused area. The fact is, improvements to the outdoor commons began last fall when the wisescape garden was implemented, and I am sure that it will continue to be landscaped. By creating designs for the entire lower commons, I hope to prevent a hodgepodge of bits and pieces of landscaped areas added to the commons by ambitious students. Hopefully, my plans will help improve our school environment and make the high school commons a place where kids enjoy going and a place where they want to hang out.

~Isabell

The Great Depression Generation

While conducting various interviews and reading books, I learned how people managed to get through the Great Depression.  The most important factor was being frugal.  Frugality is defined as the quality of being economical with money, food, and clothing; thriftiness (Webster Dictionary).  Being frugal and careful with money was necessary for survival in the 1930’s.

When asked the question, “How did your family manage in those times?” Evelyn Wissner, who grew up in a small town in Minnesota, responded with, “By being careful with our money.”  No one could afford to be wasteful or frivolous with food, supplies, or money.  In an essay published by The New Deal Network, Judy Busk writes of the importances of being frugal.  Busk stated that, “Rags were precious, to be used, spread with mentholatum, to wrap sore throats; or to make rag rugs; better cloth was cut up and used for quilt squares.” (NPR).

Being frugal came with the mentality that you could never throw anything away because what you were disposing of  could have potential use at some point down the road.  With this mindset, came hoarding.  Hoarding is the mass collection of items that pile up over time, and it became very popular during the Great Depression.  While others may see the items being hoarded as useless or without value, the hoarder sees value or use in these items and is incapable of disposing them.  Many of the hoarders tend to believe that they are recycling and reusing, rather than hoarding.  In a way they are reusing and recycling, but hoarders are unable to establish when they have gone too far with their collection of items and their inability to throw items away.

All of these characteristics displayed in the Great Depression generation, remained with them for the rest of their lives.  When asked the question, “Do you think the Great Depression had any effect on the person you are today?” Evelyn Wissner responded with, “Yes.  I think I am still very careful about how I spend money.  I don’t like to be extravagant.  I never want to be poor again. With the savings I have, I could certainly spend more than I do.  I don’t buy more than I need.”

When I asked the same question of, “Do you think the Great Depression had any effect on the person you are today?” Ernie Peterson, who grew up in Los Angeles,  responded with, “Oh yes. Definitely. I watch whatever I buy very carefully. I never spend full price for anything. I always check to make sure it is on sale, otherwise I will not buy it. I hate spending money on anything. I know that stems back to the Depression. My parents were that way too.”

~Abi

3 Great Apps for Students (and Teachers)

For my second blog post, I decided to focus a little more on apps that could be useful for both students and teachers. The three apps I reviewed were Mathway by Mathway LLC, an app for checking math problems and practicing your skills, Google Drive by Google Inc., a cloud storage service that stores documents, photos, and presentations, and Comic Life 3 by plasq LLC, an app that allows you to make your own comic books and share them on social media. I use all three of these apps, and I can personally attest to how useful/awesome they are! Check out the reviews by clicking on the link below.

Link: http://jamiejeli.weebly.com/ or type jamiejeli.weebly.com into the address bar

~Jamie

Why Composition?

I like organizing things. That is not to say, of course, that I am an organized person by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, as anybody who knows me well can testify, in most facets of my life I am decidedly disorganized. The disarray of my day to day life, however, has not precluded from, on occasion, finding enjoyment in the act of organization. It was on one of these occasions that I discovered my love of composition, for, borrowing from the reflections of Edgard Varèse, music is simply organized sound.

My experience with music started badly: when my mother signed me up for piano lessons in the 5th grade. It was a nightmare for both me and my teacher, and although it may difficult to determine how much of that was due to our vastly different personalities, it is safe to say I was hardly inspired to be the next Mozart. As I have often remarked, the only good thing to come from it was the addition of a piano to the household.

Five years later, during the summer before 10th grade, I was drawn back to the piano. I like to remember it as a magical moment of discovery, but in reality is was just an attempt to pick out the melody of "Axel F" from Beverly Hills Cop. Humble beginnings, I suppose. Soon after, I became fascinated with music, and spent a good portion of the summer exploring it.

When school started, I befriended some of my peers who were already accomplished musicians and from them I learned two things. First, I had an incredibly underdeveloped ability to play instruments compared to my peers. And second, I had a surprisingly overdeveloped theoretical understanding of how music worked, to the point that I had already surpassed my peers. It was the combination of these two facts that inspired me to try my hand at composition.

~Ned

A Final Compilation

As the semester began to wind to a close, I started looking through all the photos I had taken throughout the semester so I could compile some of my best works into a photo portfolio. Between Yellowstone, Washington D.C., Maine, New York and Moscow, I had plenty of photos to go through. But, how to separate the good ones from the ones that I had taken for sheer touristy reasons?

Most of it ended up coming down to the composition of the photo. Where was the subject placed in the photo? Was it in the center? If so, the photo probably did not last long in the vast list of possibilities. Along those lines came questions such as: What is the viewpoint in the photo? Is it interesting? As a viewer, do my eyes move to all parts of a photo or do they quickly get drawn to the center and remain there? Another common question I would ask myself was, what would it look like if I cropped the photo here? Does that improve the composition? Should it be put in with the other possibilities?

After sifting through my many photos, I had a list of around 50 unedited photos that were all possibilities for my portfolio. At this point, I turned to my faculty evaluator, Mr. Shipley, to help me decide which photos should be included and what sort of editing I should do to the photos. We discussed each photo individually, talking through what could be done to edit each and where its potential came from. After this discussion, I made the suggested edits on some of the photos and compiled around the best 20 into a final portfolio, some of which are included below.

This, in my opinion, was one of the most rewarding experiences of the semester. After having put in all the work, I could finally step back, analyze my photos, and realize how far I had progressed in the last few months.

~Rachel C.

I Spy an Athlete

For this entry, I decided to describe the differences between horses built for two of the most opposite disciplines. This is to emphasize how important profiling is, especially when choosing a new horse or training a horse with promise in a certain area. One of these horses is from the dressage world, and the other from the pleasure realm. See if you can spot some major differences!

Didn’t notice? Here are a few:

(We will refer to the lighter colored horse as Horse #1 and the darker colored horse as #2.)

1. Horse #1’s neck is set lower than Horse #2’s.
2. Horse #2’s hind quarter (butt) is less sloped than Horse #1’s.
3. Horse #2 has a slimmer, more stream-lined build than Horse #1, who has a stockier, more muscular build.
4. Horse #1’s knees are set lower on the leg than Horse #2’s.
5. Horse #2’s hocks (the major back leg joint) are straighter than Horse #1’s.

But why are these differences significant? Is there a reason that these two horses are built so differently? Which one is for dressage, and which one is for pleasure? To find the answers, come to my final presentation!

~Kristina

Serial Killer Culture Part II

Most people have read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or at least know the general concept, but not everyone knows that when they watch a movie that has a killer as a main character, they become their own Mr. Hyde. It is hard to admit. I have been studying this topic for an entire semester and still cannot admit it, but when we watch serial killer movies, we secretly live out all of our own dark fantasies.

Serial killer movies portray some of the grotesque crimes the human race has produced, but somehow society has absolutely no problem with them. Silence of the Lambs, a movie about a cannibalistic serial killer, and a serial killer who uses women’s skin to create a full body suit for himself, is arguable one of the most celebrated films of all time, winning Academy Awards in all five major categories.

I will admit that I love dark, violent movies, and am especially fascinated by the films that contain serial killers. Silence of the Lambs is one of my favorite movies, and I personally do not think there will ever be a better movie ending than Hannibal Lecter saying, “I have to go, I’m having a friend for dinner.” Despite all that, I still find it strange that I am not concerned that Lecter is one of the most famous and well liked movie characters of all time, and it seems to me that you should, too.

~Anna

Leadership Without Communication Is Not Leadership

Imagine for a moment that you belonged to a club where the president of the club did everything by herself. She used only her ideas and never listened to the thoughts and feelings of the members. Don’t you think you would become frustrated and angry with her? Would you feel unheard and unimportant because she continually shot down the ideas of others? This is not good leadership. A good leader understands the importance of listening to what others have to say and makes people feel heard and understood. What if instead the president had taken the time to listen to what each member had to say and acknowledged their ideas? Not only would the club members feel like they had more say in what happened in the club, they would also gain a greater respect for the president as a leader.

Although my focus for my ELI this semester has been on becoming a better public speaker and communicator, one of my main goals was to apply communication and public speaking skills to leading and apply the skills I learn to my leadership. The communication process plays a very vital role in leadership because without it how would a leader lead?

A leader is someone who has a purpose and is able to convince others of the importance of her purpose. It is through good communication skills that a person is able to do this. In the book The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Good Leader, John C. Maxwell states, “People will not follow you if they do not know what you want or where you are going.” Clear communication enables a leader to share her point of view while responding to the opinions and ideas of others in such a way that makes them feel heard and important. People are more likely to follow a leader when they feel like their ideas are taken seriously.

Communication is a long process that takes a lot of work before perfection is reached. If a leader implements the necessary aspects of communication into how she interacts with others, she will create stronger credibility and gain more support for her ideas.  

-Elli

More Than a Musician’s Worry

Walking out on stage, violin tucked under my arm, the bright lights blind me from being able to see the black pit that makes up my audience. My fingers are a cold, clammy mess, and there are butterflies - no, caterpillars - making their way around my stomach. As I bow, I worry that I’m going to trip, fall, and! look, there goes my career. But I don’t fall, and the audience quiets down, some last reshuffling and repositioning as I place my violin on my shoulder. I let go of my fears and start playing, when suddenly, my stage fright returns and I stumble my way up a difficult passage. Smiling in nervousness, I try to forget the mistake and continue on, but it haunts me, and I make more and more slips in the piece. I finally finish, but no joy comes to me from completing the piece. The audience claps politely, I slip away behind the curtain, and the next performer is up. But I stew in frustration. My performance was a disaster.

While there may only be a few who struggle as I did with stage fright, performance anxiety affects millions of people worldwide. Actors, musicians, athletes, test-takers, public speakers… Few are free from the burdens of stage fright.

I decided to focus part of my ELI on performance anxiety this semester. Although I have been growing musically, my stage fright hinders me from reaching playing my best during my performances. I was interested in learning about what makes me nervous and understanding how to make performance anxiety work in a positive, instead of a negative, manner for me.

For some, thinking about the audience in just their underwear staves off their stage fright. Others, like me, need a different approach. I have learned about centering, anxiety hierarchies, “un-catastrophizing,” mental rehearsal, and other techniques to avoid the negative consequences of performance anxiety. However, it’s important to keep in mind that performance anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing. No stage fright is perhaps almost as bad as having too much. Having the right amount of performance anxiety will lead to a better performance; the anticipation and excitement of being on stage will sharpen the performer’s finesse. The skill needed for all performers is to be able to walk the fine line between none to nauseum in order to perform at full potential.

~Satoka

The Thought Process Behind Short Stories

Short stories can be some of the hardest types of writing to master. When writing, it is essential to actually think about what you are putting down on paper and what you are trying to say. I’ve always been fascinated by stories in general, with so many different elements going into each piece of work, but short stories are a separate entity from the realm of novels. For starters, short stories are, well, short, and this changes the way that the elements of the story can be developed and manipulated. When a story is fairly short in length, personality of characters generally cannot be developed very well, and the setting can be harder to develop as well.

Something common in short stories is often the author’s inability to properly develop a consistent storyline. A common fault in short stories is an overdeveloped plot, as it is common to think of an idea that is too complicated for the way that the idea can be implemented into a short story. This is one reason that I chose to work with short stories, because I enjoy writing plot, and think of it as a challenge to create a plot that can easily fit into a short story successfully.

Now, as for why I chose to work on short stories. As I enjoy writing, but often find it challenging to do, I thought that it would be a good idea to do something on writing for my ELI. As it is generally not plausible to write a novel within a few months with no previous experience in writing, I thought a good way to be able to achieve a sense of creative writing was to write short stories. Although short stories are hard to write, I believe that if something is hard, it is simply a challenge, which is why I chose to write short stories. I plan on achieving my goal of refining my writing in this ELI by reading many short stories and then studying the stories. After this, I will practice writing stories using techniques that I have studied from the stories that I have read. This is how I plan on achieving some of my goals throughout this ELI.

~Ben

C++ Blog the 2nd

NIM is a computer game where the players remove a number objects, and the one forced to remove the last objects loses. This was the second program project Ranger and I worked on. This one uses loops and random numbers. We changed the output to say “who had won.”

Random numbers are hard for computers to work with. When I hit “3” almost every time, I would always win. This was because the computer would always generate the same sequence of random numbers. So we had to start the game in a new place.

Loops would always continue on and on until we got out of it. We use loops in games to make turns continue until somebody wins.

We also made our game player versus player and it was kind of hard to do. We had to make the code for Player 2 to do the same thing that Player 1 does. This program was harder to write than the first one.

~Craig

Why should we even care about plant evolution (and other mysteries)?

Throughout this semester and last, during which I studied plant evolution and phylogenies in island environments, I have been asked the question, “So, why are you doing this? Like, what is so special about a plant?” I would ponder over this question myself, and finally came to the conclusion of why plants are so important to understanding the history of the evolution of all life-forms. Though animals may seem more exciting to study because they move and eat and make noises, they would not be alive without the vast diversity of plants that have been able to adapt to the different environments on this earth - animals have only been able to adapt to life on earth because of the migration of plants from water to land and their adaptations. But most intriguing for evolutionary studies is the evolution of plant species in island or island-like environments (that includes montane regions).

This semester I am studying the evolution of Scalesia on the Galapagos islands. According to previous studies, Scalesia is part of the Heliantheae genus and is a sister clade to the Viguiera subspecies. Viguiera originated from the Peruvian Andes and relates perfectly to my previous ELI subject, the evolution of Lupine species in the Peruvian Andes at extreme elevations. Apparently, during the late Pleistocene, a land bridge formed between North and South America, which allowed for the transfer of Viguiera to the Galapagos islands as well.

Some of the background I have needed to understand my reading about previous research done on the Galapagos involves data analysis methods such as Bayesian Inference, Maximum Likelihood, and Maximum Parsimony. Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian Inference are very similar - they describe the statistical probability that a character (a trait) may change from one state (for example, from a cytosine to a guanine) in a population by using statistical algorithms that nowadays are mostly calculated by nifty computer programs.

The fact that one can infer the tree phylogeny of several species in a genus from observing the rate of change of character states seemed intriguing to me, and it made me wonder if there was any chemistry involved in the process. Throughout the year I have been taking AP Chemistry online and had relatively recently learned about the rate of reaction in a chemical system at different states (such as equilibrium state, increased pressure or volume, or other environmental stresses that may affect entropy and enthalpy which in turn affect Gibbs Free energy). I wondered if perhaps the probability of the rate of change between different nucleotides in a DNA sequence in a species could be related to the rate of reaction of that change, which was affected by the outside environment, in which the species were situated due to epigenetic markers that were involved in the chemical reaction (as catalysts, buffers, or other).  I felt like this understanding would allow people to better understand why evolution occurs in a population and would allow us to prevent harmful viruses and bacteria spreading.

These thoughts have been floating around in the swirling chasms of my brain, and I hope they interest you too.

~Valeria

Oral History --The Importance of Preserving The “Ordinary”

Almost any student could identify what year World War II ended or who the last President of United States was. Important names and dates such as these are what we are asked to memorize and what fill our textbook pages. But schools rarely teach, and students do not know, what emotions an individual felt when he or she heard the war had ended or the experience of one of the White House Custodians. These personal stories are too specific for classes and textbooks, and so too often die with those who hold the memories. By losing these stories, however, society loses much more than a nice memory, but the very experiences that define the human experience. Such personal stories spin the thread of our shared humanity, the thread which becomes a lifeline in times of personal and international difficulty. The collection and preservation of these stories requires a technique that seeks out the narratives of  “everyday people,” opposed to those of the elites. This technique is Oral History, and the topic of my second ELI.

Before this ELI, I had had little exposure to formal oral history. So little, in fact, that I set a goal to begin by gaining a basic understanding of what oral history really is. After reading and comparing varying definitions from different sources, I have decided to define oral history as the gathering (through audio recording, writing, video, etc.) of historical information through a conversation between two people. This conversation consists of an interviewer asking questions of the narrator, who answers at length from his or her personal experiences. Often these questions are themed (for example: Would you tell me about your experiences as a nurse in World War II?), but do not have to be. Historians can use oral history to gather personal information about a world event or time period, but historians are not the only, or the most important, interviewers. Any person who is interested in the experiences of another can record an interview that could become an important record for individuals, families, and communities.

In the end, the purpose of oral history is to fill in the historical record with personal accounts from everyday people, whether that be done between a granddaughter and grandmother or an historian and war veteran. As I study oral history, I am repeatedly touched by the power it has to save some the most important stories of the human experience, told by those who might otherwise have been overlooked. I believe that recording and cherishing these stories is as important, if not more so, as memorizing the most often identified dates and names in history.

~Emma

Tai Chi ~ The Power Zone

After a nice class of Tai Chi and discussing the topic of this vlog, the power zone, with my mentor, I began to ponder the idea of a power zone and what it could be used for. Since making this vlog, I've had more breakthroughs on uses for the power zone and its importance. Not only does it increase your power and stability, but it keeps you ready for your next move.  If you’re out of your power zone, you'll have a harder time even reaching, let alone hitting, your opponent. Just two days ago in Tai Chi, we were working on destabilizing our opponent’s stance with little movement. Simply by moving their outstretched hand and placing one of our feet next to theirs, (not behind or interlocked, simply next to it), we could destabilize their entire stance. The following video will demonstrate the power zone and its primary uses.

~Jack

Bam! Pow! SHAZAM! The Female Side of Superhero History: Part 2

Hello, lovely amazing readers! I’m back, with some more information on superheroines and how awesome they are. For this second blog, I will regale you with tales of new advances in the world of superheroines in cinema (spanning the 2000s and beyond).

Let’s start with Elektra. Elektra, a very popular comics superheroine, beat the bad guys in her own movie in 2005 on January 14. Having watched it, I can say that this movie is at best exciting and at worst dumbfoundingly confusing and badly written. Elektra was a box office bomb. Since that flop, Elektra has been the most highly cited film (besides Catwoman) as an example of why the comic industry shouldn’t create any more movies starring superheroines.

In July 8 of 2005, another comics based movie hit theaters. This movie, The Fantastic Four, was based off of one of the first ever supergroups in comics. It didn’t do as badly as Elektra and Catwoman, but it was not the best of movies. The Invisible Girl stood out as a very strong female character, refusing to let her three male teammates outshine her.

No other movies really shook the comic world until Marvel’s Iron Man, released May 2, 2008. The movie was fairly popular, and more Marvel movies followed. Iron Man 2, released on May 7, 2010, was the first of the new Marvel movies to introduce a female superhero: the Black Widow.

Black Widow landed a much larger role in the movie The Avengers, which pretty much started the superhero movie craze. She was the one superheroine in the six person Avengers team. Fans loved Black Widow, and she made a reappearance in Captain America: The Winter Soldier as Captain America’s co-star.

Marvel even upped the ante by bringing in yet another black-clad assassin in Guardians of the Galaxy, the surprising summer hit of 2014. Gamora was her name. She may have been a green alien, but she did a great job of holding her own alongside her four superhero teammates.

The year 2015 forecasts even more hope for superheroines in cinema. Captain Marvel is coming out in 2018, while Wonder Woman debuts in 2017. However, these two movies are only, after all, two movies among a plethora of those to be led by superheroes. Marvel alone has the movies Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, The Spectacular Spider-Man, Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1, and Black Panther scheduled to come out in that order. And then Captain Marvel.

I wouldn’t say things are quite fair yet.

~Tia