• January 2017 •
Highlights
2 ~ Gingerbread
House Building Take a
look at what this year’s high
schooler built before break
3 ~ Lol If you are having
a bad day, or suffering from
studying-syndrome, this
might make your day.
4 ~ Science in 2017
Read about what this
year’s hottest topics in
science research will be!
5 ~ Planned
Obsolescence
Read
how manufacturers are
bamboozling you…
6 ~ Spanish
Muñeca Dolls See
what students in Spanish
class created to welcome
the New Year.
7 ~ The Book of Bad
Ideas A talented fifth
grader reflects on an
amusing art project her
class did in MS art.
Important Events
of January 2017:
Wednesday
4
Amnesty
International
Presentation
Art by Sophie (11) – Full image on page 5 in “Humanities”
Planned
Obsolescence
By: Sophie
The juniors in the IB SL/HL Spanish
Class are working on their
environment unit, in which they
examine the concept of planned
obsolescence and its effect on our
planet. Planned Obsolescence is the
concept
that
manufacturers
purposefully create products with
limited lifespans (products that are
obsolete). That way, customers will
have to buy the product more often
after disposing the old one, allowing
the business to make a bigger profit.
The origins of this technique can be
seen with the production of light
bulbs.
In 1924, major light bulb companies
including Philips and General Electric
met and collectively decided to limit
the lifespans of all their manufactured
lightbulbs to 1000 hours, even though
they’d already invented light bulbs that
could last 6 times as long. As deceptive
as this sounds, it worked. Consumers
continued to purchase light bulbs and
replace them when the filaments died
out, allowing the companies to
increase profits.
As much of a conspiracy as planned
obsolescence seems, it’s actually a
major reality. If you look around any big
department store or even your house,
you’ll
find
so
many
more
examples. How many times have you
replaced a toaster or a fan or a laptop
because it just stopped working? How
many times have you bought a new
smartphone when your old one’s
screen broke because it was more
expensive to repair it than to just buy
the newest model? Businesses use this
tactic of making their products shortlived and cheap, so that no one thinks
twice to buy another and so that they
can profit continuously…
(See full text on page 5)
Friday
Monday
Friday
6
23
27
HS Lock-In
Fine Arts Week
Begins
Jazz Showcase
Edited by Sophia, Sophie, and Ms. Lasky (HS English)
2
Gingerbread House Building
Photography by: Ryan and Sophie
Right before winter break, the Elements team hosted a Gingerbread house building
contest. Five teams in the high school had one lunch period to assemble either the
prettiest or the tallest house. Here are the teams and their final creations…
Team Sannah (Sophia + Hannah):
Team Santa Babies:
Prettiest
Winner!
Tallest
Winner!
Trying to carry it…
The piping skills here
though…
Team Dank Tank:
Team Soupy Elves:
Mixing frosting with milk
to make it easier to
spread…
Team Seniors:
1 January
« Rapun-tsar: Rapunzel
at the top of her
tower/the tsar of Russia
surrounded by
proletarians. Two guys
on bottom: prince and
page boy/Lenin and
Trotsky
Braided a fruit by the
foot and attached it to a
lollipop to create
Rapunzel’s luscious
…After carrying it up the
locks.
elevator to show Mr. Camosy.
2016
3
Lol
By: a bunch of awesome people from elsewhere
in society
1 January 2016
4
Fun fact! Federico Erebia retired from his
career in medicine to design his Arania
furniture inspired by spiders. This wooden
furniture folds completely flat! _INSIDERScience
Science in 2017
By: ScienceNews and Emma
ScienceNews asked some of the
leading experts in Astronomy, Life
Sciences, Neuroscience, and Earth
Science for their opinion on what will
be topics of interest in the new year.
Their responses are below!
Christopher Crockett – Astronomy:
Space missions across our solar system
will fill the news in 2017, says
Christopher Crockett, with NASA’s
Juno probe building a 3D picture of the
inside of Jupiter and the European
Space Agency’s ExoMars orbiter
looking for trace gases in the Red
Planet’s atmosphere. Cassini’s mission
at Saturn will be “the most fun,” says
Crockett. “It is the end of the mission,
so the engineers are getting braver
with the spacecraft.” Planetary
scientist Glen Stewart of the University
of Colorado Boulder calls it “kamikaze”
stuff. “They are taking the spacecraft to
places it was never designed to go,”
Crockett says. “They are going to start
flying close to the rings. And early in
2017, they are going to use the gravity
of Titan to slip between the rings and
Saturn, and will eventually dive toward
the planet.” The findings could fill in
details of how the solar system formed
and evolved. August’s solar eclipse will
be big news, Crockett says, and the
Event Horizon Telescope could make
headlines, too. The project has linked
together telescopes around the world
to build a virtual radio dish as wide as
Earth that could take a picture of the
supermassive black hole at the center
of the galaxy. “What they are trying to
do is phenomenally difficult,” Crockett
says. “We’ll see if that actually works.”
Susan Milius - Life Sciences:
After an exciting year in mosquito
science, Susan Milius says she is
“suffering through the reruns until we
get to Season 2 of great mosquito
research.” The basic biology of these
diverse insects received quite a bit of
attention in 2016 because it mattered
for predicting how Zika virus would
spread. In particular, Milius wonders
how the conflicting results will sort out
between U.S. labs that report that a
common Culex mosquito can’t
transmit Zika and labs in China, Brazil
and Canada (work still ongoing) that
suggest the species can. “Is it
differences in the mosquitoes? In the
viruses? What’s going on?” In 2017, a
long-debated pest-control test in
Florida could release the first
genetically modified mosquitoes to fly
free-range in the United States. “We
are at an interesting time in the
application of biology,” Milius says. But
the best stories in organismal biology
are the ones you don’t predict: “Given
several billion years, all that mindless
happenstance evolution has veered
way into the improbable.” She points
to 2016’s finding that melatonin makes
midshipman fish sing. And what’s been
supposedly known for years-that
spiders can’t hear airborne sounds
from across the room-“can turn out to
be just wonderfully wrong.”
Laura Sanders - Neuroscience
“Our ability to figure out what the brain
is doing, and to really influence it, is
going to be a promising area in the
coming year,” says Laura Sanders. The
Brain Initiative, which launched to both
skepticism and excitement in 2013, “is
rolling on and picking up steam.”
Sanders will be tracking developments
in new technologies, including neural
dust, those miniature ultrasonic
devices that recently demonstrated
their ability to detect nerve activity in
rats. She’s also interested in
ultrasound’s potential to influence
neural activity, along with other
approaches that work from outside the
skull and so don’t require brain
surgery. In a dramatic example,
researchers reported in 2016 that they
had helped a patient recover from a
minimally conscious state through lowintensity ultrasound stimulation of the
thalamus. “It’ll be interesting to see
where that goes,” Sanders says. Still,
there’s a long way to go between basic
brain science and treatments. Sanders-
1 January 2016
who was born in the analog age but has
children who will be digital natives-is
curious to find out how iPads and other
digital devices are affecting kids’
brains. “Deep down I’m worried about
it because I think there are so many
valuable aspects of face-to-face
communication,” she says. “The art of
conversation is so different from
texting.”
Thomas Sumner - Earth Sciences
“In climate news,” says Thomas
Sumner, “2017 is almost certainly
going to be cooler than 2016.” El Niño
boosted global temperatures, but it
has now ended — making it unlikely
that 2017 will be another record
breaker. “The last time we had a big
drop down, people started saying
‘Global warming doesn’t exist
anymore.’ ” Sumner wants to be clear
about the science up front: “There is
natural variability. We will continue
seeing temperature increases in the
long run.” In a special issue in Science
News planned for early 2017, Sumner
will take readers on a geologic journey
back to the dinosaurs’ last days. A
recent drilling expedition into the
Chicxulub crater is taking a shot at the
long-standing, sometimes heated
debate over what killed the vast
majority of plant and animal species on
the planet 66 million years ago. Did
massive volcanic eruptions bring down
the dinosaurs? Or did their end come
from the fallout of an asteroid that
struck Earth’s surface near the Yucatán
Peninsula, leaving a crater as wide as
New Jersey is long. “It’s a dino massmurder whodunit,” Sumner says. The
drilling team will probably pin down
the energy released by the collision
and will study the resulting
environmental consequences. New
clues may offer an answer or spark a
whole new round of questions.
Science joke: Being absolute zero is 0K
with me! (Actually zero Kelvin… Get it?)
Planned Obsolescence
By: Sophie
The juniors in the IB SL/HL Spanish Class
are working on their environment unit,
during which Professora Navarro is
teaching them about the concept of
planned obsolescence and its effect on
our planet. Planned Obsolescence is the
concept that manufacturers purposefully
create products with limited lifespans
(products that are
obsolete). That way,
customers will have
to buy the product
more often after
disposing the old
one, allowing the
business to make a
bigger profit. The
origins
of
this
technique can be
seen
with
the
production of light
bulbs.
In 1924, major light
bulb
companies
including Philips and
General Electric met
and
collectively
decided to limit the lifespans of all their
manufactured light bulbs to 1000 hours
even though they’d already invented
light bulbs that could last 6 times as long.
As crafty as this sounds, it worked.
Consumers continued to purchase light
bulbs and replace them when the
filaments died out, allowing the
companies to increase profits.
As much of a conspiracy as planned
obsolescence seems, it’s actually a major
reality. If you look around any big
department store or even your house,
you’ll find so many more examples. How
many times have you replaced a toaster
or a fan or a laptop because it just
stopped working? How many times have
you bought a new smartphone when
your old one’s screen broke because it
was more expensive to repair it than to
just buy the newest model? Businesses
use this tactic of making their products
short-lived and cheap, so that no one
thinks twice to buy another and so that
they can profit continuously. Clothes that
may be “cheap” in price and quality may
not last quite that long but are never a
huge upset to toss out and replace;
however, all those shirts with holes in
them that have been thrown out are
sitting in landfills right now. Their
synthetic materials are extremely slow to
decompose and are contributing to the
already massive amounts of waste that
humans have created. Every time a store
restocks its shelves full of brand new
textiles, there are tons more polluting
the earth. Every time you dispose of an
old shirt and buy another one for your
closet, yet another unwanted piece of
cloth ends up rotting in the ground.
Even though there are multitudes of
disposable clothes, appliances, and
products that are a detriment to our
already fragile planet’s situation, there
are undoubtedly ways to combat this
problem. Some ways to fight the
negative effects of planned obsolescence
are to hang on to appliances by repairing
them when they’re still usable instead of
immediately ditching them. In fact, there
are already movements in action around
the world such as Repair Cafés that
provide free repair services by bringing in
volunteers who have experience fixing
appliances or sewing minor holes in
clothes. Another common effort being
made is to donate unwanted clothes to
places like Goodwill in an effort to reuse
them, but even Goodwill can’t keep up
with all the excess, sometimes even
resorting to selling textiles to salvage
vendors. Even when recycling clothes,
there comes a point when planned
obsolescence’s
intentions
become
evident: the cheap fabric is ultimately
unfixable, unwearable, and undesirable.
Imagine if everything we bought lasted
us a lifetime. If everything was maybe a
little more pricey, but was made of
impeccably durable quality: one phone,
one computer, one bike, one car, one
closet full of clothes for everyone, and
billions less wasting away in landfills.
However, the argument could be made
that planned obsolescence is actually
beneficial to society and the economy.
1 January 2016
For instance, it allows for everyone to
have access to products because of their
affordability. It also promotes the
constant innovation and improvement of
products (ex. Smart phone and car
models) as well as provide jobs and
stimulate the economy (more buying and
more selling means more money being
circulated).
Because of the numerous pros and cons
of planned obsolescence, the 11th grade
SL/HL Spanish Class did a role playing
debate over the issue. The class was
divided into two opposing sides and
within those, two different perspectives:
Those in favor of a Repair Café:
Neighborhood association of
Atwood, Madison Infoshop
VS.
Those against: Trek bike store,
Workers of various professional
repair shops
The situation was that there was a
proposal for a Repair Café to be built in
the town of Atwood. Students took turns
advocating for either why a Repair Café
was necessary in order to combat the
negative effects of planned obsolescence
or why a Repair Café would only steal
profits from many local repair businesses
by providing free repairs. Both sides had
valid arguments, but no one “won.”
What really mattered was that they
became conscious of a prevalent issue
and learned the story of both sides, and
hopefully, consumers and manufacturers
alike will also come to realize the effects
that their actions have on the earth.
6
Muñecas: Dolls for Big Kids
By: Sophie
El Año viejo is a tradition in Ecuador,
where people make dolls from old
clothes that are stuffed with paper
(some even put firecrackers inside).
Then, each doll is made to represent
aspects of the old year (el año viejo)
and then is subsequently burned at
midnight. This tradition reflects the
end and the ridding of whatever
negative things happened in the past
year and the new, fresh start of the
next (el año nuevo).
Middle and high school Spanish
classes worked during the last week
before winter break on making their
own muñecas. In small groups,
students brought in materials and
worked to create reflective and fun
representations of 2016. Before
getting to the nylon stockings,
newspaper, sonstructions paper, old
clothes, tissue paper, and markers,
students first had to brainstorm the
events that made 2016 so unique.
Unlike how it’s traditionally done,
students also included good things
that happened in 2016 as well as the
bad.
movement, the passing of numerous
celebrities and singers (including
Prince, David Bowie, Muhammad Ali,
and many others), the Pokemon Go
They came up with noteworthy
events such as the Rio Olympics,
the first time Cubs won the World
Series in 108 years, the
presidential election, the tragic
murder of gorilla Harambe, Brexit
(the term coined for Britain exiting
the European Union), the death of
Fidel Castro, the Syrian refugee crisis,
climate change issues, the zika virus
outbreak, the earthquakes in
Ecuador, the Brussels terrorist
attacks, the Black Lives Matter
game, big movies (“Finding Dory,”
“Moana,” etc), memes, the bottle
flipping craze, and of course the
renowned dab. Each group worked to
include one or as many of these
aspects in their dolls and write a
description about how each element
of the doll represents something
bigger of 2016.
Causes of the
Civil War
By: Ashlyn)
In 11th grade history
class, juniors have
been studying the
causes of the Civil
War. To end the unit,
they were asked by
Mr. Camosy to make
a timeline of the seven causes of the
Civil War. Groups
went through a process of elimination
to find the most impactful causes that created divisions between the North and the South
or raised tensions over slavery. Here is an example from Matt & Lucas. Some highlighted
events are the invention of the cotton gin (1793) which increased the reliance of slavery in
the South, the Mexican-American War (1846), which increased U.S. land by ⅓, the writing of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin which was an emotional novel about slavery, the Ostend Manifesto
which was the attempt to declare war on Mexico illegally, and the election of 1860 when
Abraham Lincoln won with only 40% of the popular vote. All of these events were dramatic
causes of the Civil War.
1 January 2016
7
The Book of Bad Ideas
By: Xanthe
“It’s a bad idea to go flying on a
ceiling fan… It’s a bad idea to poke a
polar bear in the butt… It’s a bad idea
to climb a tree with a hippo… It’s a
bad idea to take a field trip to the
moon…” These are just a few of the
many bad ideas the 5th grade classes
have been writing and illustrating in
art class…
It all started with a simple sheet of
paper - the book of bad ideas
instruction sheet. No one knew or
understood what we were supposed
to do. We puzzled over it and
assumed it was just some silly
assignment we would have to do
while a substitute was here. But after
Mr. Steffes, our art teacher, told us it
was probably confusing, and that he
hoped we’d like it, we listened to his
much clearer explanation. He said
that we would be drawing and
illustrating a book of bad ideas,
where we would come up with a
funny, bad idea, and illustrated it. He
showed us his example, ‘It’s a bad
idea to skateboard on an alligator,’
and our minds started buzzing with
silly ideas. Some of us couldn’t help
but start saying our ideas out loud,
while others had hard times even
thinking of any.
Soon we had many cartoony sketches
of our bad ideas in our notebooks,
with all different angles, mistakes,
styles and sizes. After we had made a
drawing that we liked, and after
multiple conferences with Mr.
Steffes, we went through the five
step finalization process: Step 1: Get
Mr. Steffes’s approval. If he says to
work on it a bit more,
then do not proceed
with the next four
steps. Step 2: Trace it
onto the final paper
using a light table.
Make sure there are
no unnecessary lines.
Step 3: Go over
outlines in Sharpie.
Do
not
shade
anything; you will
shade
with
watercolor. Step 4:
Watercolor! Step 5:
The hardest one.
Trace printed words
onto your paper, then go over the
words with Sharpie - with Mr.
Steffes’s help, of course.
When you see the warning page and
cover, know that they weren’t drawn
by Mr. Steffes. They were drawn by
students. There were competitions
to decide whose drawing won for
each place, in which the students
were included as contestants and
voters, and there were many entries.
This might sound like an easy project,
but it has taken over two months and
most of us have many mistakes,
cross-outs, and scribbles in our
notebooks. Our unique drawing
perspectives and senses of humor
show through, and all the students
had lots of fun doing this seemingly
crazy project.
This children’s book will hopefully
lighten up your day, and make you
laugh and laugh as you think of your
own bad ideas, and what you would
have drawn. You could even try your
own!
Elements Contributors (Semester 1)
Editors:
Writers:
Sophia (11th)
Ashlyn (11th)
Celia (9th)
Sophie (11th)
Elizabeth (11th)
Chris (11th)
Ms. Lasky (HS English)
Ryan (11th)
Molly (11th)
Emma (10th)
Priya (9th)
Guest Writer: Xanthe (5th)
1 January 2016