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