Bamboo Times Halloween Special

2014 Halloween party Overview ! As the most recent Halloween party at HIS has ended, we have decided to release an article about the event itself and the origins of halloween. Firstly, on behalf of the entire magazine team, I’d like to thank and congratulate the SRC for another wonderful halloween party. This time though, it really was different as we had this one activity before a dance. The activity was great, as it gave chills to many and was also based off of horror movies. The objectives were great as well. However, as this part would still be a sandwich review, here were the cons. The event was well thought out and different from the ones from last year, however, it took too much time, making it seem like as if it wasn’t well planned out. Some of the teams were split unfairly, giving some teams some advantages, as seen from the differences between the houses. The dance was fine, but the food was too limited. But to give credit, the dance was still awesome as the SRC successfully transferred the tradition of Halloween in HIS. Our thanks and credits to Jonah Chau for being our main DJ for the Halloween dance. However, as this is only the first big event that the SRC has planned, it is obviously a great start as people still walked away with huge smiles carved into their faces. One last note, for those who didn’t attend the dance but are reading this article, first, shame on you for not having school spirit, and second, your loss, it was an awesome party that everyone who missed it shall regret it.

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HALLOWEEN

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NEW HIS FAMILY !This year, there are plenty of new students joining our HIS big family. Let’s take a chance to know who they are.

! Hi, I’m Jessica, and I’m in charge of the interviewing part of the new magazine team. For this issue, I’ve been interviewing some new students from eleventh grade and tenth grade. After reading this section, hopefully you will get to know more about people who are new to our school. !!! We started the interview asking asking about their previous schools and their decisions for coming to HIS. Joshua Yoo, one of the newer eleventh graders, said “I was studying at GCA, Grace Christian Academy, and I come to HIS for a better studying environment.” “I was at DIS, and I came here because Derek is here” said the other eleventh grader, Henry Huang. !!! As for tenth grade, we interviewed Hank Hsieh, Parkson Lin, Sherry Feng and Sabrina Chang. Hank was previously studying at Galena High school in the US. Parkson used to study at KCBS, and he came to HIS because he wanted to study in a US college. Sherry was in an exchange student program last year, and she studied at Lycée Presles, a local school in France. “I came to HIS because I wanted to go to Europe for college instead of a US college.” Sabrina used to study at Korrnell. She transferred to HIS because Korrnell didn’t have a high school department, and she wanted to study in Europe in the future as well.!!! When we try to know more about someone, we always want to know what they’re best at. Joshua is really into swimming. “It’s my favorite sport,” he said, “If I name three things that makes me happy, they will be a nice swimming pool, fancy gyms, and friends.” Henry and Sabrina both has basketball as their answers. “I prefer basketball, and my favorite team is Miami Heat,” said Henry. “Also, my basketball shoes are painted with my favorite colour - pink.” Sabrina isn’t only good at basketball, she is also good at swimming and dancing.!

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! Hank and Sherry also has some other special aspects. “I’m more fluent at MMA, mixed martial arts,” said Hank. “Does it need to be sports?” Sherry asked. “If isn’t, I would say I’m the most fluent with making different shapes of balloons, such as balloon dog.”!!! Since there’s only a few people who had sports as their answer, we moved onto their favorite subjects. “My favorite subject used to be P.E.” said Henry Huang. “Same here,” said Joshua. Why did you say “used to?” I asked. “Because we don’t have it anymore this year.”!!! “My favorite subject is environmental science,” said Hank, “I like the way the teacher teaches.” Apart from those answers, Sherry’s favorite subject is art. Parkson and Sabrina’s favorite subjects are also P.E. !!! In addition to those questions, which seemed kind of boring, we started asking some more interesting questions. Living in today’s society, almost everyone has a smart phone, so I wanted to ask a question about it. On your phone, which app do you open first? Out of six of them, Joshua and Sherry chose Instagram, while Henry and Parkson chose Line. This ended up resulting a competition between Instagram and Line. Just kidding. Aside from those answers, Hank opens “Messengers” to check his text messages. Sabrina was the only one who said she opens snapchat first. !!! What is the one thing you can’t live without? I asked. Parkson, Sherry and Sabrina chose their phones, while Hank chose freedom as his answer. “There’s no such thing for me,” said Joshua. The most interesting answer was Henry’s answer. “One thing I can’t live without? An object?” He didn’t hesitate and answered, “my mirror.”!!! During the interview, we obviously found out that Henry is a very confident person. He described himself with a single word — handsome. He checks his hair right after he wakes up in the morning everyday. “Three things that makes me happy are checking out myself in a mirror, playing basketball, and hanging out with friends and family,” Henry said. “I want to be a movie star in the future.” !!! When the interview landed on the question “what do you do if you only have 24 hours left to live,” Sherry was honest about her answer, “I think I will eat for the entire day, and not stay at home.” Sabrina, however, wanted to spend her time with her family “I will hang out with my friends first, and spend my last night in the world with my family.” !!! Parkson described himself as humorous. He talked about some pranks he did when we brought up this topic. “There’s a lot that I can’t recall, but I think the best one I did was when I fooled my teacher in my previous school, I told the teacher that the eight-treasure porridge in the bag was my friend’s vomit, and I drank it all.” He laughed, “she was freaked out.”!! At last, the most interesting question, which might be the question that we’re all curious about: on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate for the school cafeteria food? Henry gives it a 2. Joshua has it at 7, “it’s not that bad.” Sabrina and Sherry rate it respectively 4 and 6. Hank rates it 2. At last, Parkson rates it the lowest — one. It seems the overall average is quite low. !! Thanks to all the new students from tenth and eleventh grade for the interview. Hope you all have a wonderful school year in HIS!

TECH RANT Secrets behind Apple Products

So as you all know, Apple recently had another conference releasing details about their “new” mobile products. Notice how I used the term “new” with quotation marks. There’s really a valid reason for it, such as the reason that the iPhones are simply just same things with different names every single year.

! Let’s start with the iPhone’s camera, the most stereotypically notorious part of it. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus utilizes an 8 MP camera. Sounds great when they say it in their presentation, right? Truth is, 8 MP

The “Amazing Camara”

cameras on phones have been used a long time ago. For instance, the 8 MP camera has been used since the iPhone 4s came out, which was approximately 3 years ago. Sure, maybe you can argue that just because a camera has less Megapixels that doesn’t mean that it’s worse. But let’s take it this way, too. Although cameras can also depend on their types of lens, aperture, and other OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) qualities and points, this doesn’t save the iPhones from getting burned. Since the iPhone 5, iPhones were known to have some side effects on their cameras, purple light. Maybe some of you don’t know this fact, but when the iPhone camera has a strong light source pointed directly at the camera, lets say a light bulb or a sun, it will look purple. This leaves us once again back to the Megapixels of a camera. Maybe due to the annual little tweaks, the images captured from the iPhone look magnificent. However, due to the small amount of megapixels, the image quality will be worse, either less details, less saturation, or less crisp qualities of photos. Cameras from phones manufactured by Nokia, Sony, or Samsung has much higher amount of Megapixels, for instance, the newest Galaxy Note 4 has a 16MP rear camera with a front camera equipped with 3.7MP, or the Nokia Lumia 1020 with a 41MP rear camera. Speaking of taking photos, let’s talk about videos. Apple has been boasting in their presentations about how their video capturing capabilities were the best in the world. This is quite a joke. iPhones can barely capture up to 1080p HD videos, while companies like Samsung, the ones that Apple makes fun of, can already shoot up to 4K (4,000 pixel) videos. Something Apple fans like to boast about is their slow-motion and fast capturing photo ability. This really isn’t something to boast about. The Galaxy S4 had the capabilities to fast capture photos already, therefore disproving Apple’s claim of “innovation,” while the slow motion video capturing was also already available at this point. Therefore, this proves that the only “innovative” thing that Apple has once again done with their new cameras was to overhype them.

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Apple has more overhyped features in their phones. Apple also claims the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have “revolutionized” their new screen technology. The iPhone 6 Plus has a display resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. They claim this is amazing. For a phone in general, sure, maybe it’s acceptable, but for a phone released today, that’s horrible. The Galaxy Note 4, for instance, has a stunning 2560 x1440 pixel display. Okay, but maybe resolution itself doesn’t explain how detailed the screen will be. Here’s a piece of additional information to that argument. The Note 4 has a 550 ppi (Pixels per inch), while the S5, an older phone than the 6 Plus, has 432 ppi while the iPhones have 401 ppi. Not just the visuals though, the usefulness and smoothness of the iPhones also suck. While the rival companies have screen sensitivity rates from 93%~100%, the iPhones have approximately 85% screen sensitivity. Now, let’s talk about Apple’s NFC (Near field communication) technologies. With Apple now boasting about ApplePay, they announce NFC technology in their phone as a revolution of smartphones. However, that is very untrue. In South Korea, since 5 years ago, South Koreans have already been enjoying their lives with NFC technology by having credit card information stored into their phones and using their phones as credit cards and debit cards. So the sad reality is, NFC technology really isn’t that new or revolutionary. VoLTE is another feature that Apple likes to show off about. VoLTE (Voice over LTE) is a wireless technology that carriers started to plan since 2010, only recently being deployed by a few telecoms, such as the US AT&T, Verizon carriers, European Orange carrier, and the South Korean LG U+, SK Telecom, and KT telecom. This technology/standard allows calls to be transferred into HSPA (4g, 3G, etc.) signals when the main calling signal is too weak. They claim that their VoLTE technology in their phones are unique and new. Before pointing out their mistake on saying so, let’s give them some credit. After all, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are one of the newest phones to use VoLTE, and they did make it capable through WiFi as well. However, they must understand that they definitely aren’t the first people to create a phone capable of VoLTE technology. Prior to the new iPhones, about 3 months before they announced their products, Samsung already declared that the S5 was capable of VoLTE. Also, Apple didn’t point out the current flaws of VoLTE, no crystal clear calls have ever been recorded so far in the

history of VoLTE. Oh, another additional note to add in here, Apple’s touch ID sensor wasn’t that new either. In fact, prior to the 4S, Motorola already released a phone called the Motorola Mobility Atrix with this capability. So, although Apple announced all of these little new features, they aren’t as good as they seem to be.

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The iWatch seemed to have many features, of course, thanks to Apple’s complimentary speech. However, the only feature that the iWatch really has that no other smart watch has is the little knob on the side of the screen. Let’s give them a little credit though, the iWatch is definitely the best, sleekest designed smart watch out there, making it look even better through its different variants. The iWatch has functions that the phone already has, which doesn’t really make our lives any easier. The one function that Apple boasted about especially was its new, weird OS (Operating System) and its new photo capabilities. Who needs to show their photos from a tiny screen when their new huge phones already have screens capable of showing photos. It is commonly known today that the iWatch is simple just a minimized edition of the first iPhone, since it had almost the same specs and features with the first iPhone. The iWatch still requires to be connected with an iPhone to initiate calls, whereas its opponents are already planning to release stand-alone watches that can access the internet and make calls without the phone itself. Also, unlike Samsung’s Gear 2 watch, the iWatch lacks a camera, which could make the iWatch seem even more useless.

iWatch

! The Free the Nipple Campaign is an equality movement that strives for the right of fair censorship, for women to be allowed to breastfeed in public, and for women and men to have equal rights. The campaign’s main focus is fighting against censorship laws which states that it is illegal for women to appear topless in public of the United States of America. They hope to resolve these issues that still exist in thirty-seven of the states in the U.S. and to do the same all over the world.!

! The Campaign has been backed up by many stars such as Miley Cyrus, Rihanna, Cara Delevingne, Liv Tyler, Jaime King, Alexa Chung, and Michelle Rodriguez. You might have also heard of Scout Willis, the daughter of the Hollywood stars Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. She has been showing support for the Free the Nipple Campaign by walking topless on the streets of New York for a day, in protest of Instagram’s policy of banning nude pictures on the site. Celebrities who are previously mentioned have been spreading messages concerning the equality of censorship between men and women by posting pictures on Instagram, tweeting with the hashtag #FreeTheNipple, and showing up in public wearing official Free the Nipple T-shirts.!

Though the campaign may be a good laugh for the netizens, Free the Nipple is a movement that serves a serious purpose for the matter of feminism and equality. #FreeTheNipple is now a world-wide trending hashtag that can be seen on almost every social media site and has become a controversial topic of concern.

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Free the Nipple Campaign!Free the Nipple Campaign is an equality movement and has been influencing people around the world.

! The 11-year-old Taylor Hatala has become a dancing phenomenon of the internet with a video of her dancing to a remix version of Nicki Minaj’s new hit-song, “Anaconda”. Her sassy performance with her choreographer Lawrence Kawai has made the YouTube video a viral hit on the internet. Their unique hip-

hop moves and attitude has gained them over nine and a half million views! Other than their huge success on numerous social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram, Taylor and Lawrence also flew to California to perform on the “Ellen” show. So keep an eye out for Taylor, because it’s for sure that this girl can dance,

and we will definitely be seeing more of her moves!

TAYLOR HATALA AND LAWRENCE KAWAI’S VIRAL DANCE VIDEO !

Editor in Chief: Henry Ko (10)Assistant Editor in Chief: Hsuan Hsuan Chang (10)Secretary: Chloe Hsueh (10)Staff Supervisor: Jennifer JosephWriters: Eric Chuan (12), Henry Ko (10), Ho Hsuan Hsieh (10), Hsuan Hsuan Chang (10), Chloe Hsueh (10), Shannon Liu (10), Jessica Chen (10)Photographers & Designer: Joseph Chen (10), Shannon Liu (10), Chloe Hsueh (10), Shawn Lin (10)

2014In association with the HIS Bamboo Times Newspaper

Than

ks!

Thanks for reading the brand new Bamboo Magazine issue!

Quote of the Month:“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

- Albert Einstein

Editor’s Note:Thanks to all of the readers of this

magazine issue! As this is a brand new

type of writing we have created, we may

have issues within this issue, however, I

personally promise that we’ll improve

from where we are now. If you have any

comments or suggestions on how to

improve, please feel free to discuss with

any of the officers listed below. Also,

since the team is relatively small for now,

I welcome anyone who would like to join

the team. Thanks again!

Acknowledgements:Thank you Mrs. Joseph for

supervising us and helping us

proofread as well!

Thank you Daphne for supporting

the formation of the group!

Thank you Joseph Chen for

dedicating the time and effort for

designing this issue!