Thursday, Sept. 25, 2014 | Volume 210 | Number 23 | 40 cents | iowastatedaily.com | An independent student newspaper serving Iowa State since 1890.
s i t r A n o i s s e r p x e
Meredith Kestel/Iowa State Daily
A member of the organization Smile Ninja talks to the Government of the Student Body at the meeting Wednesday. Smile Ninja does positive acts around campus to make others happy.
GSB funds CALS Week, Smile Ninja, Homecoming committee
Visiting professor critiques artists, inspires creativity By Andrew.Standley @iowastatedaily.com
By Mikayla.Tendall @iowastatedaily.com
F
orcing together two contradicting ideas that don’t belong together inspires artist Aaron Tinder when drawing ideas for new works of art. Tinder explained this at an art critique in the Memorial Union Wednesday night, where students and other aspiring artists had an opportunity to get feedback on their own pieces. Tinder teaches in the department of art and design at Grandview University in Des Moines. He obtained a Bachelor of Art in art education from Simpson College and a Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing from Northern Illinois University. His array of work takes images and fragments that represent mismatching elements and contradictions in a collage-based piece of art. For example, Tinder clashes gender stereotypes by incorporating ribbons and toy cars in bright pink and blue pastel colors in his exhibit “Dissonance and Recall” set up in the Pioneer Room in the Memorial Union. The clash, he said, creates a symbolic environment of childhood through concepts of nostalgia, family and ancestry. “It’s funny — someone once pointed out to me several years ago that I never worked with pastel type colors at all and then suddenly I started using those colors in my work,” Tinder said. “It was around the time I had my first kid. My daughter was born in 2001, and prior to that I didn’t have any pink or pastel colors at all and I didn’t think about it at the time.” To Tinder, it’s all about layering, having fun and digging through those layers to find what looks cool that makes creating art so satisfying. “I don’t really want anyone to look at it and know exactly what it means,” he said. “I want them to kind of be able to relate to maybe what I’m getting at, but not have it be really obvious. I think it kind of does that.” The entire body of work was created from February to June of this year. While the majority of his pieces are hand-drawn, many pieces in the exhibit are also photographs. Tinder described a recently-found interest in taking staged photographs. He attributed his newlydiscovered interest to the rise of the idea of “everybody is a photographer” because of Instagram and other social media. After Tinder described his artful journey and shared how he composes his pieces, individual artists were invited to present their art in front of the room and receive feedback.
ART p8
Sam Greene/Iowa State Daily
A local artist examines a piece of Aaron Tinder’s work at a gallery located in the Pioneer Room of the Memorial Union on Wednesday.
Overuse of antibiotics poses health risks By Kelly.Schiro @iowastatedaily.com According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 258 million courses of antibiotics were prescribed to people in the United States in 2010. Dr. Martin J. Blaser, professor at New York University and director of the NYU Human Microbiome project, spoke of the dangers of overusing antibiotics to a crowd of about 230 people Sept. 18 at the College of Veterinary Medicine. Blaser said antibiotics are killing ancient microbes in our bodies. The microbes in our body help defend against invaders, make vitamins and digest food. “[People] think [antibiotics] have all the benefits and no cost,” Blaser said. Americans use 40 percent more antibiotics than Swedes do, and they’re just as healthy according to Blazer. Blaser and his colleagues have been doing studies on the correlation between the overuse of antibiotics and health issues such as celiac disease and obesity. People who had recently developed celiac disease were found to be 40 percent more likely to have been prescribed antibiotics in the preceding months compared to those
Jonathan Laczniak/Iowa State Daily
Claudia Lemper lectures to her Microbiology 302L class about its research projects to find and test soil samples in Science I Hall on Tuesday. Lemper, who is part of the Small World Initiative, hopes her lab class will end antibiotic resistance.
who didn’t. The study found the more courses of antibiotics administered, the higher the risk of disease. “We’ve given antibiotics to mice and we’ve shown that the mice have become obese,” Blaser said.
It’s important to note that their findings don’t reflect causation, but rather correlation, Blaser said. Taking more antibiotics indicates there might be a higher risk for developing health issues. “Our goal in research is to understand what are the exact organisms that have disappeared,”
Blaser said. In the last 50 years, Blaser observed previously rare epidemics like asthma, food allergies, juvenile diabetes and obesity are becoming more frequent in the population.
ANTIBIOTICS p8
The Government of the Student Body approved funding for College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Week, Smile Ninja and the homecoming pep rally at Wednesday’s GSB Senate meeting. CALS Week is a weeklong celebration — usually during the first week of October — that recognizes the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences with activities and guest speakers. CALS week this year will take place from Sept. 29 to Oct. 3. The Senate voted to allocate nearly $2,000 of Senate events account funds to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Student Council for CALS Week. The council requested the money to help fund a concert during the celebrations. The money will be used to make electrical improvements to the Hansen Agriculture Student Learning Center where the concert will be. As it stands, the building does not have the capacity for electrical output needed for the concert. Due to building rules, the organization that asks for building improvements is responsible for funding the improvements that will need to be made. Since Matthew Kerns, the CALS Student Council president and senior in animal science, said CALS Week is funded primarily through sponsorship that already came in, the council did not budget for the extra $2,000. Some GSB Senators considered the electrical improvements to be a university responsibility, not something that should be funded using GSB money. Other senators agreed, but they said using the $2,000 needed to make improvements would benefit students and student organizations in the future. Kerns said that the work for the electrical improvements is already underway to be ready for CALS Week. However, the issue was whether GSB would fund it or the council would go into a deficit to fund the work. The Senate voted to allocate the $2,000. Another student group that received funding was Sninja, or Smile Ninja. Sninja, which existed unofficially for the last two or three years according to members, officially became a student organization this year. The group works to spread smiles around campus and create an atmosphere of positivity. Actions include leaving change at a vending machine for a student to find and use for a free soda or candy bar and passing notes with messages such as “you have beautiful eyes. Pass it on to someone else who has beautiful eyes,” members said. The group requested $301 or advertising throughout the year to spread the word about the club and recruit members. The money would be used for ads in local newspapers, magazines, Facebook and a mass email to the student body. Their request for $301 was granted by GSB. The Homecoming Central Committee received $11,652.46 for the large stage used at the Homecoming Pep Rally.