Melanie Schaefer Makes Waves at State Meet

by Beth Gardiner

  The girls' swimming season lasted an extra week for one special competitor. Melanie Schaefer had a phenomenal sectional meet, qualifying her for the state competition. Freestyle being her main event, Schaefer placed second in the 100 free and fourth in the 200 free at the sectional meet. “I was really excited this year because I was going to compete at state level as an individual for the first time. This meant a lot to me because my hard work has finally paid off,” shared Schaefer.

  The State meet was held on November 15th at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Natatorium. The day started for Schaefer with a PHS pep rally, so that students could send her off in style. Schaefer and Captain Maddie Kieler headed off with Coach Peters and Coach Wunderlin for a relaxing day in Madison before the big meet.

  The big race on Friday night went very well for Schaefer. With many of her close friends cheering her on, Schaefer’s hard work paid off, as she placed 13th in the 200 and 9th in the 100 freestyle events. Schaefer reflected on the trip by describing the feeling of representing her school at the state level. “Being on the opposite side of the pool and seeing all the fans representing their school by their state shirts was an incredible picture to see.”

Alumni Runners

by Allie Serres

  Platteville Cross Country has always had a legacy for greatness, but some of Platteville High School’s runners go on to be even greater. Laura Donovan (‘13 graduate) and Tricia Serres (‘12 graduate) are now all competing at the college level.

  When Laura Donovan first went to UW-Stout, she wasn’t really sure what to expect. As if trying to make the cross country team as a freshman wasn’t scary enough, Laura was coming off a torn ACL injury. But that didn’t stop her. Not only did Laura make the team, she ran on varsity. On Saturday, November 16th, she competed in the Regional, National Qualifiers meet in Rock Island, Illinois, where she ran 6 kilometers in 23 minutes and 53 seconds.

  Tricia Serres went to Luther, where she is in her second year of collegiate running and loving it. Tricia had an amazing season. She led her team to the Regional, National Qualifiers meet in Northfield, Minnesota, which was also on Saturday, November 16th. Her 6k time was a 21:42, putting her in 3rd overall, which made her an automatic qualifier for the National meet. At Nationals she placed 32nd with a time of 21:57, earning her another All-American title (The top 35 receive All-American honors).

  In order to qualify for Nationals, you must either be a part of one the top two teams from each regional meet or be one of the top five individuals that are not part of the qualifying teams. Luther Girls placed 4th as a team in their regional, but coaches got together and picked several “At-Large” teams (teams that, once compared to other teams that have qualified in other regionals, deserve a spot at Nationals). Luther was one of the teams chosen to make make the trip to Hanover, Indiana on Saturday, November 23rd for the NCAA Division 3 National Cross Country meet. There they placed 27th out 42 teams.

Supporting Your School

by Carla Hoppe

  One word describes Platteville High School’s fall sports season: Wow! There are several reasons why Platteville teams had such great seasons: hard work, dedication, great coaches, and amazing people to be around. There’s a long list of great accomplishments from this fall, including boy’s soccer winning our conference, girl’s swimming having a state qualifier, football going to state, fall play getting to sectionals, girl’s cross country qualifying eighth at sectionals, and boy’s cross country placing sixth overall at state. These are all AMAZING accomplishments, and we should be proud of all of these groups.

  But what if there weren’t any fans at these events, or any support for these participants? Would they have gotten as far as they did? As Psychology Today puts it, on an article related to school pride and its effects on a school, “School spirit appears to be a surprisingly powerful phenomenon.”

  Let’s pose another question: What if the crowds that came to the football games toward the end of the season came to every event at our school? Now, as football is the American pastime, the crowd of supporters that came to the state game would realistically not show up at all of the events in our school, but the encouragement could be just as strong.  

  All of the send-offs, encouragements, announcements, signs, and support from Platteville community and schools contribute to the success of our activities. Every single one of the events previously listed made it to their goals because of a member of our school or community supporting them.

  Be an athlete, a competitor, or a supporter. There are so many activities to choose from! At the very least, let’s gain more respect for all school events and more knowledge of each event. Platteville is an amazing community with countless opportunities and records of success, so  become a part of that success.

Behind the Scenes of Working

by Rachel Lueder

  Picture a tree in your mind…what do you see? Big beautiful boughs, towering over Earth’s dark soil. A sea of green leaves on an endless number of intricately woven branches. What you usually wouldn’t think about are the roots. The roots are what keep the tree standing tall. They make sure water is evenly distributed throughout the trees’ branches. In the standpoint of a musical, the cast would be the branches and leaves, while the crew would be the roots.

  I sat down with Bryn Bowden (‘14), one of the stage managers from this years musical, to learn more. When asked about what the job of a stage manager entails, she told me of all her duties and those of the crew. I was intrigued at the amount of work put into the musical by the crew to make the show what it is. Right at the very start, the crew is busy making plots for lighting, sound, and for stage. They then make a prop list and scavenge around for all the things needed. If something on the list can’t  be found then it is the job of a crew member to build it. With the help of Mr. Urness and Mr. Swailes, the set for the musical begins to take shape. Things start to come together. Production is now in process. The crew is still busy, though. They have to move pieces of the set onstage, take them back offstage, and yell out lines to those who have forgotten them. Each crew member has a different responsibility. One crew member might have to remember to bring a box onstage, and another might have to remember to turn on a mic at a certain time.

  When asked what her favorite part about being on crew was, Bryn stated it was the family aspect of everything. “When you spend hours upon hours backstage with someone, you tend to get to know them really well.” said Bowden. Being in the cast, I can attest to the amount of hard work that goes into production. So the next time you see a bunch of black-clad people assemble on stage at the end of a show, make sure to give an extra hoot-an’-a-holler for those that dedicate their time and effort to make everything go as smoothly as possible.

Word of the Year

by Saafia Masoom

  The company Global Language Monitor (GLM) says that every 98 minutes a new word is created. And somewhere along the way we got Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year for 2013: “selfie.” Though the term was coined in 2002 on an Australian online forum, it only began to see a rise in usage over the past year. Who knew people were using this kind of terminology in those days?

  Oxford offers the alternative spelling “selfy” for the more common usage of “selfie.” While the actual entry defines it as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website,” we’ve observed the word being slipped into context rather casually to suggest that it is merely just a picture taken of oneself. It all seems pretty selfie-explanatory.

  Think back over the past twelve months to how many times you’ve typed the word “selfie” into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. If you answered with “0” then clearly you didn’t contribute much to the 17,000% surge in frequency that Oxford editors reported seeing since last year.

  As alluded to before, the Word of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to be new; it just has to demonstrate notability or frequent usage. The choices are selected based on their representation of the particular year’s characteristic mood, philosophy, or cultural mindset. Thus, it’s probably not a surprise that the U.K.-centered Oxford Dictionaries offices and the U.S.-based teams have chosen different words over the past few years. A special research program called Oxford Dictionaries New Monitor Corpus scans web data each month to obtain about 150 million words in use from the English language. It provides statistics based on what’s being used where, how often, and identifies new words. Ultimately, a panel of editorial, publicity, marketing staff members, lexicographers (people who write the dictionary), and other consultants pick the winning word from those that appear on the New Monitor Corpus radar often.  

  This year’s candidates ranged from “bitcoin” to the obvious “twerk.” In the end, it was decided that “selfie” would triumph all by being rewarded with the online dictionary entry. But, let’s face the facts. It’s a well-deserved honor since nearly everyone, including Justin Bieber and Hillary Clinton, has hopped on the selfie train. And that, combined with this recognition, makes “selfie” one pretty special word.  

A Novel Idea

    Writing a novel seems like a daunting task, yet over 300,000 people manage to achieve this goal every year. Formerly known as the Office of Letters and Lights, the National Novel Writing Month office is located in Berkeley, California. Classrooms, coffee shops, and libraries will be filled with authors as this non-profit organization encourages aspiring writers of all ages and from all over the world to step up to the challenge and write 50,000 words in the month of November.  

    There are no rules, except to finish the novel before 11:59 PM on November 30th. Starting November 25th, all participants who have reached the 50,000 word goal can submit their work on the site, and the novel will be evaluated to make sure it is not just random words. Their website, www.nanowrimo.org, helps the author keep track of word count, with a bar graph indicating the progress. This organization gives all writers the chance to finally write the novel they had always dreamed of writing, but had never found the time to complete.

    NaNoWriMo’s popularity has grown since it was founded in 1999. It has gone from 21 participants and six winners to 341,375 participants and 38,438 winners in 2012. A “winner” is someone who manages to finish the novel and enter it before the deadline. Over 250 novels written for NaNoWriMo have even been published, including Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl. Many stories are still unwritten as their authors keep putting the task aside, waiting until they will have enough time. NaNoWriMo stimulates the writers and helps them put their stories on paper, calling all authors to action with their slogan, “The world needs your novel.”

Keeps Me Logged In: How Technology's Physical Warmth Brushes Your Thigh and Creates Lust, Not Love

be E.J. Kruser

  Social Media is part of all of our lives, whether we like to admit that we still have a Facebook account, which stopped being cool two years ago, or not. Just kidding, it was never cool. But do you know what is cool? High test scores and extracurricular activities! Straight A report cards! A clean and healthy colon! Scholarships to Ivy Leagues and student loans under 30 Gs! Do you feel me, PHS? Or, is it necessary for me to punctuate the end of each sentence with “#Realtalk” for everyone to understand that, by typing these individual characters on my keyboard, I’m really saying words? #Thatsunnecessary

  The point is this: social networking negatively affects our productivity. In the United States alone, 12,207,423,487 collective hours are spent browsing on a social network every day. I use the word “spent” and not “wasted” because I am not some all-seeing omnipotent being, and therefore cannot know for certain whether you took two-and-a-half hours to arrange your silos in Farmville or were reconnecting with your estranged, long-lost cousin via instant message. I’m fairly certain, however, that the time you spent on YouTube did not help you get any further in understanding your essay assignment on transcendentalism. According to sources, the GPA of college students that regularly use Facebook is a full point lower than peers who resist the urge to check the “Keep me logged in” button. Today’s youth need some sort of outlet for all their creativity and desire to share their own subjectiveness regarding such subjects as what I ate for lunch and collections of low-resolution pictures of my cat, but more importantly, they need to develop their brain regions. Developing and stimulating are two very different things. Social networks are good for the latter. It only makes sense that young adults in America are drawn to social networking sites, because it’s all they know.

  Our generation grew up in correspondence with the ever-evolving world of technology. It’s always been there, and it just looks so darn attractive! Recalling my 8th grade health class, this is known as lust, and not love. Paul thinks he’s in love with Susie because she’s the only one whose hair holds that alluring aroma that he can never quite put his finger on. It’s conditioner. There are a thousand other females who use the exact same Herbal Essences product. Unfortunately, Paul hasn’t come within close enough proximity to 999 of these lovely ladies to adopt the same feelings he has for Susie. This same principle applies to the world of social media. Because we haven’t encountered anything quite like Tumblr in our real lives, we feel like this must be the one and most amazing way to share photos and videos with your friends. Well, maybe it is, or maybe the face-to-face interaction that occurs when indulging in the old-fashioned way of photo sharing (showing your friends physical Polaroid photographs) offers a much greater form of satisfaction on a far deeper, more personal level. If you never strive to obtain the next best thing, you will never know it. If you don’t thrive in school because you are preoccupied with status updates and Imgur albums, how will you ever make it to the Big Apple, where your would-be soul mate Fernando awaits to share wisdom and the greatest cat pictures ever taken with you? You won’t. But you need to. Not for yourself, but for everyone else whose lives you are affecting by blowing up news feeds and photo-bombing friends’ selfies. Log off the interweb and start taking steps towards your real-life goals. Be all that you can be. Do it. Do it for Fernando.

One Card to Rule Them All

by Max Frommelt

Do you know what’s troublesome? Cards–there are simply too many of them. Credit, debit, rewards, point and gift cards. If you want to simply carry them all, you have to be able to find all of them first. Then, when you want to use one specific card, you have to root through your bag to find it. Meet Coin, the electronic, swipeable card that can hold the data from all of your cards in one place. You scan in the card from the downloader. Once it is recognized, the downloader pulls the information into your iOS or Android device. You then take a picture to be able to see your card on the mobile app. Coin combines this scanned image and the data it receives from the scanned card. Once that is done, it pulls the information from your mobile phone and works in tandem with it. This means that Coin is the physical card, while the mobile app creates and organizes your cards over bluetooth. So, if you don’t have the your phone with you, you can still use the physical card itself. However, you might want to make sure you have your phone anyway: you can store any number of cards on your mobile device, but Coin has memory space for up to only eight of your most frequently used cards on the physical card. Worried that you’ll be billed multiple times for the same item? If you want to make sure a purchase is only charged to a specific card, the Coin app will lock Coin so it only uses the card you select. You might think that this would make it really easy for someone to steal all of your cards at once, and with it, your identity. However, along with convenience, security is a big feature of Coin, too. Let’s say you leave your Coin behind. When Coin senses that you're not near, it sends a notification to your phone to tell you that you forgot it. It also locks the physical card, so if someone has stolen it, they will be unable to use it. Simple, easy, secure–and only $55 on pre-order. To purchase Coin or find out more about this revolutionary idea, go to https://onlycoin.com/.

Console Wars

by Neil Perry

When Microsoft and Sony both announced the Xbox One and the PS4 respectively, people strongly favored the PS4 due to poor marketing decisions on Microsoft's part. They initially required the console to be always online and required the Kinect to always be plugged in. Because of this, Microsoft has had to go back on many decisions and work twice as hard as they thought that they would need to in order to stay in the game against Sony. Luckily for them, their efforts have paid off since the pre-order numbers for both consoles were incredibly similar.

When comparing, the Xbox One has a stronger launch line up than its rival, the PS4. The Xbox One has Dead Rising 3, which looks fantastic, and there’s the surprise that came out of nowhere, Killer Instinct. Dead Rising 3 scored well (8.3), but Killer Instinct also scored well (8.4), especially considering how most people thought that it would be the weakest launch game of both systems, as many thought that it shouldn't have even been made. The Xbox One's games are not perfect, though; they have their own version of Knack. They have RYSE (6.8), a game with a fantastic story and incredible graphics, but the combat system falls short. The awful combat system combined with only a six hour campaign really put a dent in its score.

Only time will tell who the winner is in this ten-year battle between Microsoft and Sony. Sony may have a small lead, but the Xbox One's better launch line up and Titan Fall releasing next year could soon turn this into a one sided battle.