Res Novae October 2016 Newsletter

RES NOVAE Monta Vista High School

04 06 07 08

|

October 2016

| Volume II Issue I

CRUNCHING DATA, HIDDEN VOTERS SLEEP: QUALITY OVER QUANTITY BOBA TEA: HOW HEALTHY IS IT? MEASLES: HAZARD OR HISTORY?

’

Bits of debris left behind by Halley s Comet will burn through the night sky in the annual Orionid

. The shower peaked on the night between , reaching a rate of about 20 meteors per hour. If you missed the shooting stars this time, don’t worry — they’ll be streaking through the sky next year, too.

meteor shower from October 2nd to November 7th October 20th and October 21st

BOBA TEA: HOW HEALTHY IS IT? MEASLES: HAZARD OR HISTORY?

ABOUT US ’

-

Res Novae is Monta Vista s student run science and

. Every month, our dedicated writers publish stories about exciting topics in STEM, from cancer research to artificial intelligence. technology magazine

2

STNETNOC FO ELBAT

04 06 07 08

CRUNCHING DATA, HIDDEN VOTERS SLEEP: QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

OUR STAFF - -

President & Editor in Chief

Kevin Li Lead Editor

Andrea Schlitt Lead Writer

Shreya Parjan Design Lead

Ilena Peng Art Lead

Carolyn Duan Public Relations

Shriya Deshpande Treasurer

Neil Palleti

Staff Writers

Aaron Lopes Adithya Embar Alice Lou Andrea Perng Angela Chau Aparna Manoj Bhakti Patwardhan Bhavna Sud Brenna Chen Charlotte Chui Daria Syskine Eilleen Chen Ellie Chen Haritha Shah Jeffrey Gong Jenny Chin Justin Chen Keerat Singh Nikhita Shanker Priya Reddy Sangita Kunapuli Srijani Saha Surya Konkimalla

3

CRUNCHING DATA, HIDDEN VOTERS HOW BIG DATA IS SHAPING OUR POLITICS

BY ANDREA PERNG

, both ’

With Election Day fast approaching

’

,a

According to research by Ipsos MORI

Hillary Clinton s and Donald Trump s

third of young people think that the use of

campaign teams are rushing to convince as

social media might influence their political

many people as possible to vote for their

vote

. Gone are the days of polls and

candidate

ringing up home phones to disgruntled

. Instead, campaigns are turning to a

citizens

more powerful tool to persuade young

: social media. And to do that, they

voters

focus on something that would tell much

:

more than simple percentages on a poll

.

. Freshman Sreya Kumar agrees.

“Social media has been one of the biggest factors in the election,” Kumar said.

“There’s a lot of things involving emails and the Internet.” She believes that the candidates’ use of social media would affect her opinion on the presidential candidates.

But perhaps most telling about how big

analytics

data is going to swing the election one way

To obtain insight on how to appeal to

’

or another is the presidential candidates

, campaigns have increasingly started to use something called big data, certain group

approach to social media

which is essentially a large amount of data

candidate

, from as

collected on interested voter groups

general as voting history and political contributions to something as granular as

, what , and who they follow and retweet on Twitter.

, the Republican , is known for being a big, bold firebrand, saying and doing outrageous things and getting lots of attention for it.

“Crooked Hillary Clinton likes to talk about Donald Trump

what videos they watched YouTube

the things she will do but she has been there

Facebook posts and pages they liked

for 30 years

– why didn’t she do them?” . Perhaps it’s this

'

—most of her posts , and occasionally she drops a few memorable lines, as was the case of the great “Delete your account” debacle of to Trump s bombasticity

are relatively calm

June 2016 Despite being millions behind Trump in

, Clinton’s team has at their , which is

follower count

side their own big data foundation

“building as big a list as humanly ,” Mitch Stewart, senior strategist for Clinton’s campaign, told Bloomberg in April 2015. Stewart hopes that this list of people who are enthusiastic about Clinton’s campaign will allow the campaign “to set the about

possible

framework or the foundation for an eventual

” and “provide the campaign .”

To utilize this data, Clinton’s campaign applies something that doesn’t cross many minds daily: micro-targeting. Microtargeting national effort

with an additional head start

uses the digital trail you leave on a certain

, sometimes in the form of small bits

reads one of his Tweets

website

Campaigns then use this information to

bluntness that brought the Republican

of information called cookies and sometimes

target ads and decide how much they need to

candidate 12 million followers on Twitter

through its data feed API

invest in engaging a population increasingly

and 10 million likes on Facebook

,

establishing its presence on social media

.

especially to millennials

.

, the Democratic , uses Twitter to provide a parallel

Hillary Clinton candidate

, to gear . You see it in action when your Facebook feed is 90% The Onion while your friend’s is almost advertisements towards you

+. You see it

is almost completely made of AJ

when you get advertisements on a page

’ . Micro-targeting has been used in marketing for years, and it’s become increasingly common in politics.

Clinton, however, isn’t the first one to use big data. Usage of big data was made big when Obama’s campaign started collecting completely unrelated to the website you re on

.

data from voter files and consumer databases

, Obama’s

Based on the data they assembled

campaign team assigned potential voters scores of how strongly they would support

. Elan Kriegel, formerly part of the

Obama

Obama campaign and now managing

’

, told Pacific margin that Obama won by back in 2012, up to “two points” could be attributed to the Obama campaign’s use of analytics and micro-targeting.

Dan Wagner, formerly the chief analytics analytics in Clinton s campaign

Standard in 2014 that out of the four point

officer for the 2012 Obama campaign and now

, estimates that the

head of Civis Analytics

campaign had 15 terabytes in data files from

, from which the campaign

potential voters

sorted through which Facebook pages were

, events attended, volunteer contacts and . Hillary Clinton’s campaign is doing the same thing: using big data, Clinton’s statistics and liked

where the money they donated went

analytics team determines what they should buy so their message gets to as many

.

receptive potential voters as possible

So does big data actually give Clinton an edge

?

over her opponent

With Trump shoving aside the possibility of data analytics as

“overrated” back in May,

members of the GOP are starting to get worried about falling hopelessly behind the

. “If you’re not prepared for it, you can’t catch up,” former digital director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign Zac Moffatt said in an interview with POLITICO. “You can’t have a baby in three months, that’s just the reality of life.”

Junior Joshua Citijaya, who uses Facebook regularly, also believes that social media modern day culture of fast paced data driven campaigns

would clearly influence the opinions of

.

“If I hadn’t already made up my mind through things I found out on my own, I probably would’ve been influenced by [the presidential candidates’ social media activity] for sure,” Citijaya said. undecided voters

SO...

Does big data actually give Clinton an edge over her opponent?

S

LEEP

Quality over Quantity

BY BRENNA CHEN

"You stretch out your arm and slam down on your alarm's clock snooze button." , bleary-eyed. Straining, you

near bright light soon before sleeping affects

alarm clock s snooze button

(NREM) and rapid eye movement sleep (REM). REM sleep, which

with a brief respite before the alarm s

occurs when you have nightmares or vivid

medication

cocoon of sleep

, contains only one phase, while , two, three and four. Right when we fall asleep, we

allows the user to experiment with variables

lethargically beginning to preparing for the

enter stage one for a few minutes and soon

You wake up

stretch out your arm and slam down on your

’

, providing you ’ insistent blares return. Eventually, the alarm blares finally force you away from your

This can be broken up into non rapid eye movement sleep

dreams

NREM sleep consists of stages one

, and you stumble awake,

.

, this is a , a way of life—and inevitable. However, an app called Sleep Cycle could revitalize this idea.

, where we truly begin to lose consciousness. When we finally reach deep sleep, we are entering stages three and four, in which we are entirely cut off from the world and outer stimuli; being

Although only students themselves can

awakened from stage three or four sleep

day

progress into stage two

For many MVHS students

common ritual during the weekdays

, this

control the amount of sleep they receive app can track their sleep throughout the

, wake them up at their lightest sleep,

night

and offer insight into their sleeping patterns

.

“Sleep Cycle uses sound recognition [to sense movement] and see how deep into sleep you are,” sophomore Michelle Tang, a user of this app, says. “You set a time frame, and the app will wake you up [in that time period] at a time where you are the least groggy and most awake.”

Additionally, according to Sleep Cycle’s official website, this app also provides a and how well they have slept

visual aid to portray how well the user has slept throughout the night and allows the person to set variables that have affected him

; the user is later able

or her during that day

to witness the effects it has on his or her

-

.

. , we don’t stay in deep sleep for the remainder of our rest. Instead, we return to shallower sleep, and then REM sleep, which sometimes provides us with dreams. gives us that groggy feeling many despise However

The remainder of our sleep is alternated with

, which switches , three and four.

writes for the website End Sleep

. Our sleep is broken

Deprivation provides

, which was confirmed by a

into five stages

1937 study by Alfred Lee Loom using sound

.

waves

.

Although Sleep Cycle is a big step and

, it is , handy tool for everyday people to experiment with.

“I mainly use it as an alarm so I don’t feel groggy every day,” Tang said. “[However,] if you’re interested in your sleep, you can use the data from the app, and learn more about how well you slept yesterday, last week or even last month.”

Using this app, one can easily experiment achievement through the field of sleep also simply a useful

optimal conditions to sleep

, we peak at stage one sleep,

Occasionally

explaining those instances in which we wake

. A regular

. In fact, efficient

sleep can be just as important as enough

, and as many people know, sleep is an . However, many

sleep

up in the middle of the night

integral part of our health

person repeats the cycle from REM to NREM

teenagers still lack a sufficient amount of

sleep and back to REM sleep around four to

this vital component

, Mastin writes for the website How Sleep Works.

So What Does This All Mean? six times throughout the night

The Sleep Cycle app uses the concept of sleep cycles to predict when you will be at

. Additionally, it contains a

your lightest sleep

sleep throughout the night

, one must first understand the mechanics of sleep, which Morton, who

-

results first hand

with his or her surroundings to find the

Mechanics of Sleep

more

, and see the

and different environments

between stages two

visual aid showing the varying depths of

, to understand this app

, along with stress, , alcohol and certain environments, Greg Blome writes for his website My Sleep Cycle Experiment. This sleeping negatively

REM and NREM sleep

sleep first hand

However

, using technology and being

For example

, and provides an

overall assessment on how well the person

. For example,

, as MVHS sophomore . “I don’t think teenagers get enough sleep, because I often hear stories of people pulling all-nighters and staying up all night studying for tests.”

And, as nearly every MVHS student has experienced from those sleepless nights, without sleep, we become bleary, Meghna Rajan notices

unproductive zombies that struggle with

. Therefore, Rajan , “Teenagers should balance their

even the most menial tasks

has slept the previous night

suggests

four to six steady dips from stage two and

everyday activities with the amount of sleep

REM sleep to stage four sleep is a sign of

they get

, while rapid dips from deep sleep to wakefulness hint at a fitful, restless sleep. Users can input variables in the app and see the effects of the night’s sleep. healthy sleep

, [so they can be] productive and feel .” Additionally, besides getting enough sleep, students should also strive to sleep efficiently, and Sleep Cycle may be a guiding light in this idea. fresh every day

T

he bell rings and a swarm of students rush to the rally court in pursuit of their favorite

.

drink

, pearl tea, bubble tea or tapioca — whatever name you prefer– has

Boba tea

tea

“I heard it’s made out of tar,” junior . “I heard boba is bad for you and it’s hard to digest.”

Priscilla Siow said

There have also been rumours that the

, but is it really true?

pearls are carcinogenic

become a popular drink at MVHS and the

Boba tea is not only sold practically

. Boba tea is sold not only

weekly in MVHS

during semiannual club food days but also

students to go on boba trips with their

.

after school for club fundraisers

-

. Despite the , few students know what they are consuming. friends or study at a boba shop

The Taiwanese tea based drink was first

’

drink s overwhelming popularity

. Although

invented in Taichung in the 1980s

the true founder of this popular tea drink

A cup of boba tea contains at least two

, the creation of boba

Other students are tentative when it comes

. When , they responded hesitantly that they will try to drink it less.

However, students are aware that it is their to changing their boba habits questioned

, it is also common for

Bay Area as a whole

“I’m okay with how much boba I have like , so I probably won’t change anything.” right now

, or six teaspoons, of sugar.

responsibility when it comes to their boba

.

consumption

When asked about the many boba

, students generally

fundraisers in MVHS

cannot be confirmed

tablespoons

agree that it would be better if the

tea is most often accredited to Liu Hsiu Hui

When compared to the recommended sugar

fundraisers were spaced out more but argue

of the Chun Shui Tang Teahouse in

consumption by the American Heart

that the responsibility does not land

, Taiwan. Lin Hsiu Hui, the teahouse’s product development manager, Taichung

Association

— no more than six teaspoons of

added sugars for women and no more than

allegedly poured a sweetened pudding with

nine teaspoons for men

tapioca balls into an iced tea drink during a

seen as unhealthy

.

. The new concoction was

meeting in 1988

— boba tea can be

tapioca present in boba tea is a carbohydrate

. Soon, the ’ -

it was included on the menu

that is a simple sugar and easily broken

beverage became the teahouse s top selling

down by your body

product

spikes in blood sugar levels

, resulting in sudden .

, especially black and green teas, , the relatively

While tea

, but how much do MVHS students

“I don’t think the school should be more ,” Siow said. “I feel

aware or held accountable

.” , many popular boba tea shops in the area such as Tpumps, Cafe Lattea, Monster Boba, Super Cue, Tea Era and Happy Lemon buying it too Thankfully

let customers adjust the

TO N R O Y H T L A E H : A E T A B O B

It is generally accepted that boba tea is

,

unhealthy

bring many health benefits

sweetness level of their drink

really know about this popular drink that

insignificant amount of tea in bubble tea is

allowing for increased

?

.

they are constantly consuming

offset by the surplus of sugar it contains There have also been rumors that

?

-

(PCBs) have , but the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA) claims that the aspolychlorinated biphenyls

It turns out that while most MVHS

been found in tapioca

students are aware that boba tea is

, they don’t know why.

unhealthy

chemicals in boba tea are not PCBs but

Junior Haritha Shah is well aware of the

“synthetic flavoring .” Nevertheless, the data is

legally permitted

boba craze although she does not consider

substances

. Even , she’s unsure about the actual contents of boba tea.

“It has milk and sugar and tapioca pearl things,” Shah said. “My parents say that it’s herself a big fan of the popular drink

still inconclusive and boba tea should

then

be consumed with caution

, not only

because of its high sugar and calorie

, but also because of potential .

content

health risks

very unhealthy and has too much sugar but

.”

’

?

So what

Shah s take on the ingredients of boba tea and its health risks is very similar to that of

Now that MVHS students are aware of

.

other MVHS students

the nutritional content and potential

Senior Ankita Chatterjee is also unsure

and she justifies her consumption of the

’

MVHS students just can t seem to give up their

. “I think

beloved drink everything in

,”

moderation is fine

,

Chatterjee said

LO U

Although it is generally known that the tea is sugary and that the drink is unhealthy

,

and has no nutritional value

AL IC E

“ The whole thing is that the dosage determines how toxic it is,” Chatterjee said.

“So even if it is bad for you, if you don’t have that much of it, it won’t do anything.”

.

?

that boba tea is far from healthy

, a topic covered in her APES class.

of toxicity

comes to tapioca pearls

-

change their boba drinking habits Although it can be concluded

sweet treat using by explaining the concept

many students are misinformed when it

, will they

health risks of boba tea

,

about the composition of our beloved drink

BY

’

it s okay once in a while if you drink it

control over their sugar

.

consumption

cancer causing chemicals known

How much do we know

— at

like the students make their own decisions of

, the

In addition to the high sugar content

loved by those at the meeting and therefore

— on the school.

least entirely

M

EASLES HAZARD OR HISTORY?

BY APARNA MANOJ

. 27, 2016, the Directing Council of the Pan American Health Organization and World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) declared a historic achievement—the eradication of measles from the American subcontinents.

Measles, also known as Rubeola, is a viral infection that can be caught from direct and indirect contact with victims. According to Mayo Clinic, the disease includes simple symptoms such as a cough, runny nose, fever but most distinctly, a blotchy, red rash.

While it is easily preventable through vaccination, once contracted, the disease is almost impossible to eliminate.

After a 22-year-long campaign, the eradication of an extremely contagious disease is nothing short of extraordinary.

On Sept

“This historic milestone would never

The survey ultimately revealed that most

have been possible without the strong

MVHS students consider themselves safe

political commitment of our Member

under the false assumption of measles being

,” PAHO/WHO Director Carissa F. Etienne told Science Daily, “in ensuring that all children have access to life-saving vaccines.”

Claiming almost 2.6 million lives annually by 1980, the deaths due to measles have gone States

down rapidly over the last few decades due

. Within recent years,

to campaign measures

-

American born cases of measles are

.

extremely rare

“I would like to emphasize that our work ,” Etienne said.

. Many students also do not

an older disease

have too much interest in taking extra

, as the

, and I remember my dad had one or .” Jennings said, “It’s not a very fun thing to have.” mumps

the other when we had it

While advising students to be vaccinated

, Jennings also commented about

for measles

measures for protecting themselves

MVHS students concern over not only their

survey also showed that the majority of

own well being

surveyors only have a moderate concern

.

over catching popular diseases

, . Having taken

For junior Anita Narkhede however vaccinations mean precaution

, Narkhede gave

, but other’s as well.

“Sometimes when people come to school and they’re sick, I think that they’re kind of being a little inconsiderate. Maybe they feel like they can establish boundaries to not get

, but that’s a little hard to do.” .“As a teacher, that’s sometimes

the measles vaccination

others sick

some thought about recommending others to

Jennings said

.

take it as well

a challenge for me because there

on this front is not yet done

“We can not become complacent with this achievement but must rather protect it

. It is critical that we continue to

carefully

,

maintain high vaccination coverage rates

and it is crucial that any suspected measles cases be immediately reported to the

-

.”

“I don’t think that MVHS students worry about contracting diseases In our community, it’s pretty rare, so no one really considers the possibility of catching them. It’s always good to at least take the precaution and because it’s extremely simple to get the vaccination, you might as well.” -JUNIOR ANITA NARKHEDE

authorities for rapid follow up

.

Sophomore Akriti Khandelwal shares a

Eradication does not mean immunity

Measles still prevails as the leading cause of

, according to

death for children worldwide

. The disease is still prevalent in , with a death rate of almost 314 each day. Yet the the WHO

.

A survey conducted among MVHS

.

students revealed that 61 3 percent of students think that major measles epidemics

, time periods much

broke out pre 1950

farther than when the illness was an actual

. 58.1 percent also said they would not be concerned with the disease in particular, threat

and almost a quarter claimed that they

.

would not be vaccinated for measles

.”

this other kid brought

: take the

It all comes down to one request

necessary precaution to protect yourself and

for being vaccinated

also expressed their opinion

Illness may not be the largest concern for

math teacher Martin Jennings discussed his

our society

experience with the contagious disease and

terminal disease like measles

.

“We didn’t have [measles] vaccinations then, in the ‘60’s. I think I had measles and

time to pay a little more attention to keeping

.” Khandelwal said, “And even

every year

need for vaccines is constantly questioned

’

are times when I felt like I m getting what

. Regardless of whether certain , whether they are contagious or not, make an attempt to put up some barriers. While measles is currently gone from our continent, as PAHO/WHO requests, we must get vaccinations to maintain this state.

and so many people migrate to America

continents such as Africa and Asia

-

, stating that it is important to be vaccinated for measles.

“We know that the disease is contagious similar opinion

though we all get our health tests done and

, it’s better to be safe than

all before we travel

.”

sorry

In addition to student recommendations

, school staff members . MVHS

his advice for the student population

others

illnesses are rarer than others

. The issue might be a nearly , or it might be the common cold, but at least for MVHS, it’s .

everyone healthy

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