Bosphorus Chronicle May 2015

Transcription

IN THIS ISSUE
İ. Furkan Özcan in THIMUN Qatar Film Festival • 2
Say No to Discrimination! • 2
Spring at RC • 3
RCyberbullies • 4
Never without Desserts • 4
DAT - Turkey’s Biggest DI Tournament in RC • 5
The Man and the Lion Problem • 7
IBM Watson: A New Era of Supercomputers • 13 - 14
Ms. Bobcat: Lisa Seed Trujillo • 5
F = m • a ... and the Rest is Math: Ernest Verbowski • 6
Eyes on me Champions: Stephen Shifflett • 6 - 7
An Esssential Thinker and ASL Teacher:
Jonathan Rau • 8 - 9
Colorful Socks, Interesting Ties,
Purple and Blue Glasses: Philip Gee • 10 - 11
Finding the Glass Slipper: Güler Kamer • 12
Erkcan Özcan’s Higgs Boson Seminar • 14
Hack Your Life with Your iPhone • 15
Peer Mentoring Program • 16
The Mpemba Effect • 16
Diary of a Mad Performer • 17
Hidden Secrets of Izmir • 17
and...
STATE OF SOUND • 18 - 19
Bosphorus Chronıcle
May 2015 Issue
Bosphorus Chronicle is the quarterly newspaper of Robert College
Study, Grow Up and Conquer Your High School
Zeynep Ünsal
Özsu
Rişvanoğlu
Is there anything cooler on earth
than becoming the main topic of a
symposium organized by the school
you graduated from? While you are
studying there, with all the stress
and the chaos, you cannot foresee
the future. Would you study more
vigorously if it was guaranteed
that you would be invited back,
with great admiration and respect,
by your school 30 years after your
graduation?
Orhan Pamuk, was an introvert, a
shy student, who had infinite creative madness. This positive madness flowed from his heart to his
fingers and finally to his paper, in
the form of art and writing. He was
given all the main responsibilities
in both the Art Club and the school
newspaper at Robert Academy.
In his interviews, he always mentions that as a teenager he read and
painted while everybody else went
to parties. In the symposium, he did
not look like an introvert with his
confidence and his bold and daring
jokes. His height of 1.95 m (6 ft 5)
and well-fitted suit only added to
his confidence.
The symposium began at 10 AM,
with an introduction by Hande Akat
and speeches from Mehmet Uysal
and Headmaster Anthony Jones.
Mr. Uysal mentioned his personal
interest in and admiration of Orhan
Pamuk; he even told us a memory
that the two of them shared. In
1983, Mr. Pamuk was 31 years old
and Mr. Uysal was already a teacher
at RC. Mr. Pamuk had come to talk
about his most recent novel, Silent
House (Sessiz Ev). He had a small
audience and the talk was in one of
the Gould classrooms. Today one of
the classrooms in Gould is dedicated
to Orhan Pamuk.
Mr. Jones talked about his earliest
memories with literature and its importance in general. A very amusing
quote from his speech: “If teachers
told me to read, I ran in the opposite direction, and the more I was
told to read, the faster a runner I became. A book felt like a large boulder dropped on me.” He also told
us how his sister made him (at age
10) memorize Whitman’s poetry for
her own amusement and how his
brother gave him a copy of The Great
Gatsby at the age of 15.
After these introductory yet inspirational speeches, five notable academicians took turns speaking. Each
one of them focused on a book of
Orhan Pamuk’s.
Prof. Dr. Nüket Esen (Boğaziçi University Turkish Language and Literature, Head of Department) was the
chairwoman. She first talked generally about each Pamuk novel and
then she did an analysis of Istanbul:
Memories and the City (Istanbul:
Hatıralar ve Şehir). It is an autobiographical novel. He mostly writes
about his years in college, how his
ideas were formed, how he started
believing what he does today and
how he left the Architecture Faculty
and decided to become a writer.
Engin Kılıç (Sabancı University, lecturer) talked about Silent House
(Sessiz Ev). The ideas in this book
create the basis for all Pamuk’s other
books. The clash between the westernized intellectuals and the nationalist poor is shown widely and thoroughly. The polyphonic structure of
the book is also admired because it
shows how even a silent house is
actually filled with both chaos and
love between every family member.
Doç. Dr. Özlem Öğüt from Boğaziçi
University analyzed White Castle
(Beyaz Kale). This book seems to
have two main characters, but it
doesn’t. And that’s the entire thing.
Quoting from the book’s jacket,“The
characters change places as the story goes from morning to evening.”
Prof. Dr. Sibel Irzık, lecturer from
Sabancı University, talked thoroughly about Snow (Kar). Snow is
Orhan Pamuk’s first and only rather
political novel. She stated that it
should be read rather ironically and
that if you take it too seriously when
you read it, you miss the meaning. If
you don’t take it seriously, you miss
the love part of it. It’s a love story
with politics interlaced in it.
Prof. Dr. Besim Dellaloğlu, lecturer
from Sakarya University, did an analysis of The Museum of Innocence
(Masumiyet Müzesi). He mentioned
that he likes the actual Museum of
Innocence (in Çukurcuma, Beyoğlu)
more than the book itself. He even
said that if they make an encyclopedia of museums centuries later, they
will use this museum’s opening as a
turning point. There will be terms
like ‘Before Museum of Innocence,’
‘Museum of Innocence Era,’ and ‘After Museum of Innocence.’
The book itself is a very strong and
important dictionary of obsessive
love. The main character, Kemal, falls
in love with Füsun. As in every Orhan
Pamuk book, they have to break up
and when they do, Kemal expresses
his obsession thoroughly in 200
pages, making us feel his obsession.
Even though the book is, plot-wise, a
love story, it is mainly about objects.
Kemal (and we can say Pamuk, too)
believes that objects are very significant in our lives. He doesn’t mean a
useful technological tool, he doesn’t
mean a book that changed your life,
The 10th Annual Culture and Literature Symposium, titled “Orhan Pamuk’s
Novel Writing” and organized by the Turkish Language and Literature
Department took place on Saturday, April 18.
he doesn’t even mean the souvenirs
you bought from your favourite city
on earth. He believes in the strength
of everyday objects.
In Turkey, for some reason, on top
of every television is a square piece
of white lace placed diagonally, and
on top of that there’s a ceramic dog
figurine. In Füsun’s house, there are
a bit too many of them –about 20 in
the living room—so nobody even
notices when Kemal pockets one of
them every time he comes over for
dinner. Kemal becomes a bit too
passionate about this object collecting hobby; he starts to collect everyday objects like a grater, the soda
bottle that Füsun drank from, and
most importantly, cigarette butts.
Exactly 4,213 of them. In the real life
museum, those cigarette butts are
carefully lined up and labeled. They
look so beautiful and so full of love
and passion that you want to collect
and frame some from your lover. If
you’re still not convinced that this is
a great book, full of great ideas, it
also has one of the best plot-twists
in world literature. It is a classic
one, but it comes when you’re least
expecting it and it hits you because
Pamuk is a master at making the
reader feel what his character feels.
In his speech before the long question and answer session, Orhan
Pamuk talked about how he met
and became comfortable with literature. During Turkish Literature
lessons he put his head on the desk
and slept, but one day his literature
teacher wanted them to write a story. The teacher didn’t give the class
any topic to write about; students
were free to write what they wanted
to. Mr. Pamuk said that this was the
first time he felt close to literature.
He was also writing poems, but he
never showed them to others. One
day he sent one of them to a poetry
competition at Robert Academy but
he didn’t win. He said that actually he was happy because nobody
learnt that he was writing poems,
but he waited for the teacher who
evaluated the poems to come and
tell him that he actually wrote a
good poem. Now, all the litterateurs
are thankful that he didn’t stop writing and instead became a master of
expressing emotions.
Left: Orhan Pamuk with RC Students | Middle and Right: Orhan Pamuk in the Library - Photo Courtesy of robcol.k12.tr
May 2015 Issue
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
1
Ekin Vardar
Sinem Meydanlı
One of Robert College’s students
has recently won a prestigious
award for his short movie “Blind
Owl”. The film won the best cinematography award in THIMUN
Qatar Film Festival. For those of you
who wish to learn more about the
Blind Owl, the Bosphorus Chronicle
interviewed the director of the
film, İbrahim Furkan Özcan (RC’16).
Can you briefly talk about the
plot of your film Blind Owl?
Blind Owl portrays the story of a
man who escapes from the city.
The main character of the film isolates himself from all human connections, yet the real thing is that
he is actually running away from
himself. Since no one can hide from
himself, he is trapped in his own
mind.
How did you come up with this
idea?
I go to dershane by using the metro
very frequently, and one day I
looked around and saw the city
filled with sad people. I thought
to myself “Aren’t we all sad?” and
caught up in this rush. I thought,
“Wouldn’t it be good to just leave
all this behind?”, and after that I
started to develop this idea.
What was the process of shooting the film? What did you do?
It took about three days for us to
shoot the film. The actor in the
film, Fuat Cem Özyazıcı (RC’16) and
I go to the same dershane, so we
shot the film right after the dershane. To be honest, I did not have
a scenario; I used a storyboard to
connect the ideas.
Have you done anything like
this before? Is this your first
time?
THE BC STAFF
edıtors-ın-chıef
Ece Selin Timur
M. Miraç Süzgün
Deniz Şahintürk
A Screenshot of the Film
NEWS&OPINIONBOSPHORUSCHRONICLENEWS&OPINION
Interview with İbrahim Furkan Özcan
I had shot a film for the Film and
Literature class before. It was more
of an experimental one, in which I
tried some techniques like blackand-white and silent.
How did you apply to the competition?
My Film and Literature teacher said
that there was such a competition
Tuvana Kankallı Göksu Kalaycı (Guest Editor)
Ayşe Leyla Ok
Ezgi Yazıcı
layout edıtors
Tuvana Kankallı
M. Miraç Süzgün
layout Assistants
Mert Akan
Tunahan Ekincikli
İdil Kara
Ezgi Yazıcı
Cover Photographs: Alex Downs
***
Publisher: Birmat Matbaacılık
***
RC adına sahibi ve yazı işlerinden
sorumlu müdürü: Güler Erdur
***
Bosphorus Chronicle is published
quarterly during the academic year by
Robert College students. We welcome
letters to the editor, feedback, and
articles by students. However, we reserve the right to edit all materials for
reasons of appropriateness of length.
Give your submissions to the advisor or
one of the editors or send it to us via
e-mail. All photographs published are
taken by the writer unless otherwise
credited.
How to contact us:
By mail: Robert College, Arnavutkoy
34345 Istanbul, Turkey.
By e-mail:
bosphoruseditor@gmail.com
Yerel Süreli Yayın
2
Bilge Tatar
advısors
Carolyn Callaghan
Robin Carnegy
wrıters
Ali Berk Eroğlu
Ali Çataltepe
Arda Başaran
Ayşe Leyla Ok
Ayşe Esin Gezer
Bilge Tatar
Burak Tunahan Ekincikli
Deniz Şahintürk
Ece Selin Timur
Ece Toprak
Ege Ersü
Ege İşkesen
Ekin Vardar
Ezgi Yazıcı
İdil Çetin
İdil Korkut
İrem Deyneli
Mehmetcan Özhan
Melis Şingin
Melisa Saygın
M. Miraç Süzgün
Oğuz Ceylan
Oktay Şen
Özsu Rişvanoğlu
Rabia İdil Demirelli
Roza Sürme Mızrak
Sinem Meydanlı
Şeyda Zeynep Ünsal
Tuvana Beliz Kankallı
Umut Deniz Dinç
Zeynep Karababa
Zeynep Naz Türkmen
Zeynep Nehir Türkarslan
Zeynep Sabuncu
As the Bosphorus Chronicle, we congratulate Furkan for his success and
wish to see more of his works in the
future.
Say No to Discrimination!
sectıon edıtors
Tunahan Ekincikli
and someone had already applied
for it before and won an award, so I
applied as well.
Furkan stated that he didn’t think
he had a chance to get an award
but it was an honor. You can watch
his short movie “Blind Owl” which
is posted on the Youtube account of
THIMUN Qatar.
People are louder, stronger and
more assertive about a topic when
they hold the majority. It is easy
to defend a side that most people
support because you know that
someone has your back. It is harder
to speak your mind or express your
choices and your ideas if no one
has heard them before, or if people
strongly disagree. This is the main
reason why minorities have not
been able to define their identities
and must hide who they truly are.
Sometimes these minorities were
the black people in the USA, Jews
in Germany during World War II,
and many more. They were under
strict control, and from the movies we have seen and the books we
have read, we can determine that
there were not many people who
were lending an ear to them. Plus,
people were judgmental and negative toward these people; discrimination was inevitable in the end.
If I study my own country, discrimination is a part of our daily lives.
The main cause of this problem is
our differences. I live in Erzincan,
and every time I go out for a bicycle
ride, all eyes gaze at me. Why? Because I am a woman. Because they
don’t see a woman riding a bike
every day. Because I am different.
When I went to the UK for a summer camp, students were having
a hard time making friends with
participants from other countries.
Why? Because they were not the
same nationality. Because they
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
didn’t share the same culture.
Because they were different. An
acquaintance of mine couldn’t get
into a police school when he was
a kid, even though he passed all
of the tests successfully. Why? Because he was an Alevi. Because he
was different.
I, too, have discriminated against
others before. (Probably you have
at some point in your life, as well).
I was on an IETT bus with two of
my friends. There was loud background noise, and it was hard to
hear what my friend was saying.
Then a transgender woman got on
the bus. Silence. Everyone, including us, stopped talking. She took
a seat. We started to stare at her.
I knew it was wrong, but she was
different from us, so I kept staring.
A few people giggled. My friend
made a joke, and I laugh at it. I did
laugh at it. I can’t imagine how uncomfortable that person must have
felt. As a person who has been discriminated against before, I regret
every second I spent staring at the
woman.
Ayşe Arman interviewed a transgender woman on June 30, 2013.
She asked her what difficulties she
faced as a transgender person. She
responded, “Every part of our life is
full of challenges: To rent a house,
to use public transport vehicles,
to go to cafes, restaurants, to be
treated in a hospital, to get education. The list goes on and on! In a
nutshell, to live!”
LGBT people also think that Europe is one step ahead of us. “If
you lived in Europe, would it be
different?” asked Ayşe Arman. The
answer: “Of course. Societies who
embrace LGBT people are more
independent.” The same question
was asked of Sedef Cakmak, first
lesbian municipal member in Turkey. She replied, “In Europe, if you
are assaulted by a stranger, you can
go to the police and request protection under both civil and criminal law. Whereas in Turkey, the fear
of being raped or being harassed
makes LGBTs change their minds.
Unfortunately in Turkey, violence
is also committed by government
agencies.”
I see no reasonable explanation for
discriminating against and marginalizing people. I think no one
should. If someone thinks that living is a challenge, then there is a
huge problem. As students, maybe
we are not able to change the laws
and make gay marriage legal, at
least for now. As Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk said, “ The rising new generation, the future is yours.” I’m
speaking as the future of Turkey:
Let’s say no to all discrimination.
We have to accept that we are all
different from each other. But we
are all humans. That is why we all
need to be treated equally.
Works Cited:
Andrew O’Brien. Man Demonstrates Against Discrimination of
LGBT Persons. Digital image. Making LGBT Rights Human Rights
Through the Global Equality Fund.
AP Photo, 10 Dec. 2013. Web. 12
Apr. 2015.
Arman, Ayşe. “Her Yerdeyiz Ayol!”
HÜRRİYET. N.p., 30 June 2013. Web.
12 Apr. 2015.
May 2015Issue
January 2008 Issue
Spring at RC
Robert College community missed its famous wisteria on Gould Hall this
year, but spring is always the best time to be in RC. Here are the
photographs of the campus as seen through students’ eyes.
(From left to right): Top: AP Photography Class and Alex Downs, Middle 1: Ozge Erbay (RC15), Middle 2: Sarah Patterson, Bottom: Philip Gee/Facebook Account
May 2015 Issue
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
3
NEWSBOSPHORUSCHRONICLENEWSNEWSNEWS
RCyberbullies
Roza Sürme
Mızrak
Years ago, using a mobile telephone was a huge amount of
work all by itself. First, you would
have to find someone who owns a
telephone. O.M.G. Can you imagine that? Fortunately nowadays,
we all have new iPhones to help
us reach whoever we want. Even
teenagers, who require the ultimate care, have that kind of power
under their hands. But, are they
capable of the responsibility or
the maturity that comes with that
power? I think the newly found
term “cyberbullying” is the answer
for that.
Although, “bullying” has its origins
even before the industrial revolution, cyberbullying is a whole
new level of harassment. As Raychelle Casada Lohmann wrote in
her article “Cyberbullying versus
Traditional Bullying”, contrary to
the traditional bullies who face
the victim directly, cyberbullies
may remain “anonymous” and say
or do things they would not do
normally. Since it doesn’t involve
a face to face interaction, it “decreases the level of empathy they
feel toward the victim”. Because of
this, cyberbullying is now more
common than traditional bullying.
According to research done by the
University of British Columbia:
“About 25-30 per cent of youth report that they have experienced or
taken part in cyberbullying, compared to 12 per cent of youth who
say they’ve experienced or taken
part in schoolyard bullying.”
Also, when it is about technology, it is harder for individuals to
go offline and forget about what
happened; you cannot just leave
the school to leave it behind. It
can reach you through your phone,
computer and any technological
device you have. Plus, it’ll never be
truly erased or forgotten.
Now, the fact that cyberbullying is
much worse than traditional bullying is known to us, it is time to
question the Robert College community to find out if we have victims of cyberbullying among us.
In Turkey, it is known that parents
and society will not endure a “visible” bullying. For instance, if you
go straight to your friend and say:
“You are as pretty as a frog”, everybody around her will develop
an attitude towards you. However,
because cyberbullying resolves
the “visibility problem”, it is now
one of the most common aggressive acts between teenagers in
Turkey. But, there is a preferred
method that bullies or groups of
bullies use. It is called a forum or
dictionary community. Like the
international version of the Urban
Dictionary, these “dictionaries”
resemble huge chatrooms where
you can ‘express your thoughts’
without giving your personal information. For most young people,
it also means that you can offend
others and be as aggressive as you
want without being judged, or
caught.
There are lots of examples for these
“dictionaries” like Uludağ Sözlük
or ITU Sözlük. Yet, I’d like to talk
about Ekşi Sözlük (Sour Dictionary), since it is one of the biggest
online communities in Turkey with
over 400,000 registered users. Ekşi
is not a strict dictionary and the
users don’t have to share or post
factual information about the
topic. This “information” sharing is
on various topics ranging from scientific subjects to everyday life issues, but it is also used as a virtual
socio-political community to mention disputed content and share
personal views. The major problem begins at this point. Under the
name of “personal view”, users/
authors of the dictionary pick a
target and directly comment their
-most of the time- offensive opinions about it. And the RC community is not exempt. Any scandalous
news about the school, any teacher who got angry with them…
just like that, our “beloved” members share their “personal views”
in these dictionaries. And they are
not only rude but also vicious and
aggressive with their comments.
Knowing that nobody can point
a finger at them, our cyberbullies
cross the line without giving much
thought about it.
But is that it? No, of course not.
RCyberbullies, know that Ekşi Sözlük and others are not the only
online platform that they can
use to hurt someone’s feelings.
Social media offers that option
too. So, Instagram profile “@dedikodu_rob_dedikodu” was born
in beginning of ast September.
This profile shared pictures of girls
in our school and captioned them
with authors’ “personal” opinions
about how they look. It was open
to everyone and immediately went
viral amongst students an hour after it was created. Although it was
deleted the next day, by that time
nearly the whole school knew it or
at least saw the screenshots of the
posts in their WhatsApp groups.
Besides being critical and offensive, the authors mainly targeted
physical appearance, which is already a huge issue for teenagers.
The problems mentioned above
are just the visible side of the iceberg. There are countless victims
of cyberbullying that I’m unable
to mention because they are too
personal. And these are the ones
only I know! Think about it. Were
you or one of your friends talked
about in a social media platform?
Or have you seen your photo with a
hideous caption? Or worse…
Have you done anything like this
to one of your friends? If you did,
I’d like to tell you something. It
might seem like a hilarious joke
at the time and everybody might
laugh at it. Maybe even the friend
whom you made fun of, laughed at
it too. However, as the days pass,
your friend will hurt everytime
he looks at his picture with a wig
captioned: “What a chick!” And you
would not be able to delete it because the Google Search archives
literally EVERYTHING.
Be aware and don’t put your friends
in a position that she would have
to explain that dance video in a job
interview. Because the real meaning of the “www” is “Whole World
is Watching.”
Works Cited:
Lohmann, Raychelle Cassada,
M.S., L.P.C. “Cyberbullying versus
Traditional Bullying.” Psychology
Today 14 May 2012, Teen Angst
sec.: n. pag. Psychology Today.
Sussex Publishers, 14 May 2012.
Web. 08 Apr. 2015.
Shapka, Jennifer. “Cyberbullying
and Bullying Are Not the Same:
UBC Research.” Thesis. University
of British Columbia, 2012. The University Of British Columbia. The
University Of British Columbia, 13
Apr. 2012. Web. 08 Apr. 2015.
mix in the chocolate chips. If made
correctly and blended long enough,
this should have the exact texture of
real cookie dough!
Banana Cherry Garcia
Ingredients: (makes 2 servings)
- 2 frozen bananas, cut into 2 cm
chunks
-1 or 1/2 cups cherries, pitted and
frozen (divided)
- Splash of milk
- 1/4 cup dark chocolate chunks
(70% +)
Place banana chunks, 1 cup cherries and splash of milk into blender/
food processor and blend until just
combined. You may need to scrape
down the sides a few times or add
another splash of milk to help the
mixture move. Add in chocolate and
remaining 1/2 cup cherries, pulse
until just combined. Serve immediately as this is a soft-serve ice cream.
Top with shaved dark chocolate, cacao nibs or raw chocolate chips.
Frozen Banana, Peanut Butter &
Chocolate Chip Milkshake
Ingredients: (makes 1 large shake or
2 small shakes)
-2 medium bananas, peeled and cut
into bite-sized chunks
- 2 tablespoons peanut butter
- 1 cup milk
-1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
-1/4 cup chocolate chips
Freeze the bananas in a covered container for at least 4 hours, or overnight. Blend frozen bananas, peanut
butter, milk, and vanilla in a blender
until smooth. Add the chocolate
chips at the end and pulse or blend
briefly until they are chopped.
Never Without Desserts
Esin Gezer
In the following weeks, we will all
start to pay attention to our bodies
to stay fit during summer. Exercising and working out are still the best
ways to achieve your goals, but your
diet also affects your weight. In this
article, I am going to share some
healthier desserts that you can prepare when you have sweet cravings.
Healthy Cookie Dough Dip
Ingredients: (high in protein, sugar-
free!)
- 1 or 1/2 cups chickpeas or white
beans (cooked)
- 1/8 tsp plus 1/16 tsp salt
- Just over 1/8 tsp baking soda
- 2 tsp pure vanilla extract
- 1/4 cup nut butter of choice
- Up to 1/4 cup milk of choice, only
if needed
- 3 tablespoons brown sugar
- 1/3 cup chocolate chips
- 2 to 3 tablespoons oats
Add all ingredients (except for
chocolate chips) to a food processor,
and process until very smooth. Then
Photo Courtesy of Thekitchn.com
4
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
Photo Courtesy of Cakenknife.com
JUNE
2012 Issue
Issue
May 2015
January 2008 Issue
NEWSNEWSNEWSBOSPHORUSCHRONICLENEWS
DAT-Turkey’s Biggest DI Tournament in RC
Zeynep
Türkmen
The weekend of 14-15 March,
2015, Robert College was Turkey’s
center of imagination-- Destination
Imagination’s Affiliate Tournament
(DAT) took place at Robert College.
More than 80 teams took part in the
competition. Our school’s DAT club
organized the tournament. Over 70
volunteers worked for 7 months,
planning Turkey’s biggest DI tournament in history.
The teams showed their efforts the
whole weekend by completing their
challenges. For the team challenge
there were 6 categories: scientific,
technical, fine arts, improvisational,
service learning and structural.
Teams had to create their own stories according to their challenge and
present it within a budget of $150.
Their job wasn’t finished after that.
They still had to complete an instant
challenge, seen for the first time in
the challenge room.
RC students prepared a video for the
opening ceremony. In the video, RC
students, staff, and teachers welcomed the DI community to our
school. After the video Joe Welch
(a.k.a. Mr. DI) made a short speech
about the spirit of DI. With his up-
lifting speech, DAT started with full
speed.
In several buildings team and instant challenges were held. In the
meantime Robert College student
organizers and volunteers tried to
make sure that competitors were
having the best time. In the end, DI
is all about having fun. That’s why
Woods Hall turned into a kind of
disco. This event was designed to
relax teams who were going into instant challenge, but it became very
popular among the teams, so loud
speakers were also placed in the
canteen area. Participants danced
to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” during
the closing ceremony.
The fun didn’t end with activities
before and after instant challenges.
The canteen area served as a fun
hall for DAT. Charades, the hot lava
game, a costume making contest,
and mini instant challenges were
part of the participants’ weekend.
Adding to the entertainment, a pizza party and cupcake sale were part
of DAT. In the dance studio they held
a mini karaoke party. Contestants
had no time to be bored.
After a weekend full of teamwork
and creativity, the closing ceremony
started. You could feel the excitement in the air. First they showed
a video clip made of photos of the
weekend. Then it was time to announce the winners. First, second,
and third place teams were called to
the stage. Different emotions were
all around the room. Two teams
from Robert College, Dumb Ways
to DI and DIdim DIdim Inanmadınız,
took first place in their respective
challenges and earned places in the
Global Finals –“the world’s largest
celebration of creativity”-- which
will be held in Tennessee this May.
Works Cited:
“The World’s Largest Celebration of
Creativity.” Destination Imagination.
N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.
always caring. See you on Thanksgiving! - Lal Toker (RC’15)
You are one of those people who
believe in others no matter what;
you started a dream that became
a precious family for many of us. In
this family I learnt what it means to
be a team and to love it with all the
good and the bad, with no judgments but only faith and trust. You
were there when I scored my first
goal; you were there when I missed
the easiest shot in Portugal. No
matter what, you’ve always been
there for me. You welcomed all of
us into this family and never even
thought twice. Thank you for everything; hope you won’t think twice
at thanksgivings as well! - Yasemin
Tekgürler (RC’15)
The blank page of my RC life had
found all the colors in my prep year
with Ms. Seed Trujillo. She always
brought out the best out in me.
Sometimes what I accomplished
was so unbelievable that I found
myself hugging her tightly as if she
would never go away. I was incomplete when I entered her class and
she found all of the missing pieces
of me. I don’t know how to thank
her for what she has done for me.
She is my teacher, my coach and my
role model. I hope one day I will also
be someone who inspires many lost
people, I hope one day I’ll become
someone who is as determined,
passionate, rightful, thoughtful
as Ms. Seed. She made a change
in hundreds of students’ lives in a
short amount of time but she will
always stay in the best place of
our hearts. Thanks for everything
you’ve done for us Ms. Seed, thanks
for the changes you’ve made in our
lives. -Aysu Sarıgül (RC’18)
In home group, 4 years from now
we would be seniors, we would get
inside only after 2 seconds the bell
rang but you would still mark us
late, you would still be surprised to
see a part of dress-code on us. We
will be seniors and most probably
we’ll have something that we won’t
call home group without you. Ms.
Seed you’re our whole prep year
and one of the most precious people I got to meet in this school. I’ll
miss you so much but I don’t worry
cause you invited us once and nothing can withhold us from bothering
you in your house in the states. You
are an absolutely brilliant, annoyingly clever teacher, and a caring
friend. Thank you for everything
you’ve done for us. I love you so
much. - İrem Özturan (RC’18)
As Bosphorus Chronicle, we would
like to share some of our favourite Mrs. Seed catchphrases.
“Nice make-up!”
“Hey, can you pull that skirt down?
Looks a little short.”
“The bell doesn’t dismiss you, I dismiss you!”
“Not your bell!”
“Ladies and gentlemen that is the
bell!”
“Happy ice cream Tuesday!”
“Thumbs on your shoulders, eyes
on me!”
“Listen first, move second!”
“Blackmail time!”
“Hey, my ears work even when my
eyes aren’t on you!”
“Go Lady Bobcats!”
“My baby Bobcats.”
Farewell to Ms. Seed Trujillo
Sinem
Meydanlı
Ekin Vardar
Another wonderful teacher that
the RC community is going to say
goodbye to at the end of this school
year is the Lise Prep Core teacher
and the girls’ football team coach
Ms. Seed Trujillo. The Bosphorus
Chronicle interviewed her to learn
about her experience in Robert College.
What was it like working with
the soccer team?
I think it is one of the best things
that I did during my years at Robert
College. We started with four players four years ago and barely had a
program, but now we have 32 players. I’m really proud.
What is one thing you are going to miss the most about
İstanbul?
The ferryboats, I think. I love the
ferryboats. I can see them from my
balcony at home so sometimes I
watch them avoid each other all
the time. I am amazed everyday
that there aren’t more ferryboat accidents.
Could you tell us one of your favorite memories in RC?
I fell down a lot around school so
those are not my favorite memories as they are also embarrassing.
But they are the students’ favorite
memories because I looked silly
when I fell. When I fell down the
stairs after my knee surgery, that
was really scary. I don’t think I can
choose a favorite. I have too many
good memories, but having former
students return to my classes to
sing was pretty cool.
How would you describe your
teaching experience in RC in a
sentence?
“If you must speak, use English.”
What advice do you have for
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your student here before they
graduate?
Read as much as you can.
We know that it is a necessity
that you have to go back to Colorado, so we wish you the best
of luck Ms. Seed Trujillo.
Farewell Messages from teammates and students:
I can’t tell how I felt when she first
shouted at me in the class because
of my “non-dress code” clothes or
when I tried to give an attitude and
kept disrupting the class. Now it is
really ironic that I can’t tell my feelings when I learned she was leaving school, a teacher that touched
both my hateful and loving side.
She is a teacher that taught me
how to be tough and strong. And a
coach to be always remembered…
- Evin Cemre Sönmez (RC’18)
To the best coach ever, I promise
that I will carry the sportsmanship
you have taught me everywhere
throughout my life and will never
beat anyone 7-0 -no matter how
much I want to :)-. Thank you for
everything, for believing in us, in
me, for helping us become better
athletes as well as people and for
Photo Courtesy of Lisa Seed Trujillo
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
5
F = m • a ... and the Rest is Math: Ernest Verbowski
Zeynep
Türkarslan
How did you decide to come to
Turkey and teach in RC?
At that time, and this was quite a
while ago, I was looking for a teaching position abroad. I had two offers: one to come to Robert College
and one to go to Bermuda. I asked
my son where he’d like to go and he
chose Istanbul. That’s how we decided to come to Turkey.
How would you explain to an
outsider the life in Robert College?
To me the most important thing
about RC that kept me here would
be the students. I saw that almost
all of the students really do want
to learn and to go to university. I
think they are all genuinely inter-
Mr. Verbowski (RC Yearbook of 2003)
ested in getting a good education
so that’s what distinguishes RC from
other schools. In many other schools
there are a good number of students
turned off for various reasons. As a
result there are many problems a
teacher would have to deal with
besides just being concerned about
what to do to help students learn.
Also I find the students in RC very
patient and forgiving…at least
openly, maybe behind my back not
so much.
What do you enjoy the most
about your lessons?
That’s probably the only part I enjoy
about the school. I hate marking,
I don’t like all the administrative
work but I enjoy interacting with
the students and also getting responses from them in class.
Have you participated in any of
the activities/clubs in RC?
I’ve been a judge in DI for quite
a long time, about 6-7 years. I’ve
been doing floor hockey since it was
introduced to the school. I was actually one of the people that introduced it to the school. Also I enjoy
the Lise Live concerts if I’m able to
attend them. End of the year concerts are the ones I enjoy the most.
Sometimes I attend some of the
sports events. It’s fun to watch the
soccer games.
How was living in Turkey for you
apart from Robert College?
I actually enjoyed the Turkish culture a lot. What kept me here was
Turkey more so than the school.
I stayed for the students and for
Turkey more than anything else. I
found the culture and the city very
interesting when I came here. Most
of the people I socialize with are not
other teachers in school; they are
Mr. Verbowski Looking Good (Photo Courtesy of Zeynep Türkarslan)
people outside of the school. Many
teachers just socialize with other
teachers. They live on campus and
mostly go out with the foreigners as
a group. I spend most of my time on
the Anatolian side. There are very
few foreigners there. Some people
think I’m a Turk.
What are your plans after leaving Robert College?
I’ve been here so long that I’m used
to it and I’ve got attachments to
many Turkish people. So I’ll probably live here roughly half of the year
and the other half in Canada mainly
because my children live there. Also
I have other extended family in Canada. I’ll spend my time in between
the two. How? …I don’t know.
What are you going to miss the
most about RC ?
Probably I’ll just miss being with
the students. My focus has always
been being in the classroom with
students, without the marking. It’s
nice to know that you just helped
students and they enjoyed learning. They may not like you as a
teacher but you should try your
best. You can’t satisfy everyone.
There are some students who love
their teachers and some don’t. I
had some students who hated me.
I hated some students and loved
some too. That’s just the way it is.
We have to all get along. That’s the
reality.
What is your favorite memory
with RC students?
Well, I don’t know. Through the
years I’ve had a good time with the
students. Having a laugh with them
and even having them laugh at me.
Or when somebody comes up to you
and says, “I liked your class even
though I didn’t get a good mark!”
If you had a chance to change
the past, would you still become a physics teacher? If not,
what would you do?
Well, I didn’t go into teaching until my late twenties. So I do have
experience doing other things. I
decided to go into it because I was
interested in education and I stayed
in it because I liked it. Whether I
would do it again...I don’t know. If
I didn’t do it again it would be probably because of financial needs, not
because I wouldn’t enjoy it.
Interview With Mr. Shifflett: The Only Thing as Awesome as Texas BBQ
Umut Deniz Dinç
Roza Sürme
Mızrak
“Eyes on me Champions,” says Stephen Shifflett, and it’s not just for
fun. If I was to take a last look on
earth, my focus would surely be at
Mr.Shifflett. He deserves the eye,
and here goes BC’s interview with
the most fabulous teacher on earth.
What is it that Istanbul has to
offer more than Texas or anywhere else in the world?
The reason for Istanbul being the
number one travel destination on
Earth is its very very rich history and
beauty. Like Napoleon said, if he
would have conquered the whole
world he would run it from Istanbul
6
because it’s the meeting of East and
West and every major area is reachable from here very quickly.
What significant observations
did you make about our country
during your stay here?
Very kind people. I was surprised at
the lack of crime compared to Texas.
When people from two restaurants
in Kadıköy got into a fight and
stabbed one another the headline
in Turkish News read “It is becoming
like Texas”. In the US that occurs so
much that it doesn’t make headlines
anymore unless it’s racially biased or
something like that. When I moved
here to Istanbul, my neighbor asked,
“Oh, is it really dangerous over
there? Are you dodging bombs and
terrorist all over bla bla bla” That
week, a lady that worked in a gas
station got shot in the head near
my hometown. Some man killed his
wife, put her in the back of his truck.
And so when you get here, I mean
there is crime always. The major
thing here is breaking into people’s
apartments, which has happened
to me. But that also happened in
Texas. Because of insurgents and
radical Islamic groups, people in the
West think there are so many problems with Islamic groups. Any little
thing happens, it gets blown up in
the news in the West. But crime is so
commonplace because of drugs and
racial things in the US that, no one
ever knows about most of it.
Can you compare your experience living in Egypt and living
in Turkey?
Both places are very big and have a
lot of traffic. Most problems come
from being overcrowded. But it was
in Cairo where I learned how to walk
in and dodge traffic. Because as bad
as it is here, you are even more likely
to get run over in Cairo. At least
three times our service bus got in an
accident, and even ran over one guy
on a bicycle. One time we were on
a head on collision with two school
service busses.
Do you have the intention of becoming a family man?
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
If I can get this second novel written,
I can think about the rest of my life.
Is it true that everything is bigger in Texas?
That does have some truth to it.
You can fit two and a half of the
UK inside Texas. Our GDP is roughly
two times bigger than Turkey’s. Our
ranches are giant. Our cowboy hats
are the biggest. And our boots are
the biggest. But we also have some
of the biggest knuckleheads in the
world in the form of the Tea Party.
I will say this, some of the biggest
social and religious fundamentalists in the world, even though they
wouldn’t call themselves that. So it
comes with the good and the bad.
What is your first memory of RC?
Also please compare students
here to students you had in
Egypt?
Well, I’m glad you didn’t say Koç because that would get me in trouble.
(Laughing) I remember coming out
to the campus and being stunned
by how beautiful it is. Just the build-
ings and the view of the Bosphorus.
You guys are much more studious
than the students I had in Egypt.
You guys are the cream of the crop.
Students in Egypt were very lively,
euphemistic way to put that. I do
miss them. They were very quick
with jokes. Extremely witty.
Why two f’s and t’s in your surname?
Because people back then were illiterate and didn’t know how to
spell their names. And so, people’s
spellings of Shifflett varied. First
Shiffletts were brought to America
to fight in the Revolutionary War.
Afterwards we wandered up into
the mountains,you know mountain people and making moonshine
and running guns. So eventually we
came down from the mountains
and started going with the western
front.
Also double the fun, double the
trouble right?
(laughing) So you were trying to get
to that.
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May 2015
January 2008 Issue
Mr. Shifflet Thinking for His Next Greatest Idea
е = -1
πі
Now here comes a serious question. We know that you are near
finishing your second novel. Will
your book sell in respect to what
sells in today’s markets?
That’s actually a very very good
question because I have to make
that decision every day. Whether I
want to go more the way of literary
or more the way of just complete
pop fiction. People have been able
to be successful with both. But success at all in book publishing has become such a rare thing that you can
hardly gage it either way. I’m trying
to do like Fitzgerald or Shakespeare
where you are playing to both audiences but without ruining the integrity of what I’m trying to write.
We know that travelling is a true
passion of yours. Could you talk
about that car accident which at
the end encouraged you in this
respect?
My whole life, I had wanted to travel. So I was in a really really bad accident. It was a head on collision. The
car was completely destroyed. People couldn’t believe that we made it
out alive. The driver almost died and
she still has a lot of problems from
that accident. I was the luckiest. My
head got split open, I was picking
glass out of my head for two years.
And my left arm was completely
shattered. They had to reconstruct it
and put two bars in it and they had
to remove a lot of the muscle. They
thought I would never be able to
use my hand again. My sternum was
also broken. Something occurred to
me when the helicopter came to get
the other person who was the worst
hurt. I said I can either be dead
or alive right now. The Universe
doesn’t owe me anything. If I wanna
accomplish anything, I need to do it
now and not keep putting it off till
tomorrow. So, in that next year I finished the novel Josie Unlimited and
I started travelling to Greece. And I
got a job in Egypt.
That’s actually quite inspirational and extraordinary.
Another extraordinary thing
about you is that once you were
blacklisted by Homeland Security. So how did that happen?
For some reason, two or three people from Texas have joined ISIS, and
they went through Turkey. Before I
came here because of the book that
I’m writing right now, I had to look
into terrorist groups and I had to
look into Special Ops stuff. I copied
a lot of stuff and put it on the internet and then I look up that kind of
Math Puzzles #3
stuff all the time. So that time that I
went to Houston, in the kiosk in the
very beginning where you scan your
passport and it gives you a printout,
well mine had an x across my face.
And then I got taken to the back,
not to the side to be questioned
like they usually do. There were
three other men and they were all
Middle Eastern. I got questioned,
they did research on me and they
asked me so many things that only
by researching my Facebook, getting access to it and that kind of
stuff, they would have known. So I
was on the list for a long time. Every
time at the airport they had to look
at all my electronics, check whether
I was carrying explosives and so on.
But finally I got it cleared up after a
year or so.
Lastly, what would you say
about your alma mater UTexas
at Austin? I expect some big insults to Harvard?
Even the British education system
ranks us as 22 in the world. Once
you get past freshman English,
especially in liberal arts, you are
being taught by Harvard, Yale and
Princeton professors. And so you are
getting an Ivy League education at a
much better rate.
v - e + f = 2
The Man and the Lion Problem
A man is stuck in a perfectly circular arena with a lion.
The man can move as fast as the lion.
Is it possible for the man to survive?
(Assume each has infinite strength).
* Hint 1: The following diagrams might help you to set up a strategy and solve the problem.
* Hint 2: Infinite Series
*** If you want to send your solution(s) to the Man and the Lion Problem, please send it as an e-mail to suzmuh.16@robcol.k12.tr or bosphoruseditor@gmail.com.
This question and the diagrams are taken from: “The Man and the Lion Puzzle: Pursuit and Evasion Game Theory.” Mind Your Decisions. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 May 2015..
"Mathematics Moderne." Flickr. Yahoo!, 25 June 2009. Web. 05 Jan. 2015.
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BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
7
An Interview with English Teacher Jonathan Rau
Oğuz Ceylan
Ece Toprak
Before Robert College, what
did you do, where did you
grow up, where did you graduate, where did you teach? Why
did you come to RC?
So before I start, can I add my own
preface? Today’s April Fools day,
and you’ve got quite the fool in
front of you.
I don’t think...
Don’t take it too literally. My sense
of things is I am happy to answer
stock questions and those kinds of
things. Since I used to be the advisor for Bosphorus Chronicle.
That’s not surprising.
Yeah, you can say that, but I am
a little worried, but not terribly
worried, that a lot of what may
come up in this interview will
never make it. You must have a
policy where you share whatever
it is that you’ve done when you
talk to a teacher, faculty member,
whatever, before you publish it.
You know what I’m saying?
Yeah.
But we couldn’t stay there for long.
I mean, this city, Istanbul calls
you. Yes, it has grown too fast, it
has too many people, it drives you
crazy, but it is a remarkable and
unforgettable city. And you carry
it wherever you go.
Cool. Having said that, let’s go
back to the question. Did you do
research before you came?
Yeah, we know that you travelled a lot before RC, but did
anything have a great impact
on you?
I have a very long connection in
my family to Turkey, as a country,
as a culture, as a place etc… because I came to Turkey as a child
a couple of times (and that was
a long time ago) and a couple
of times as an adult, in terms of
teaching positions. The reason is
my father worked for the US State
Department; he was a diplomat, a
Foreign Service officer, and among
his postings, when I was very little, initially we were in Izmir, way
back in the early 1970s. It was a
very different time, and after that
for 2 or 3 years he was assigned
to Istanbul as an economic counselor, and this would’ve been the
mid-70s or so. And that was my
first experience of Istanbul as a
child. We lived in Rumelihisarı,
I can even show you the house
that we lived, which is right next
door to where my boy goes to preschool. A lot has changed since
then. Anyway, flash forward many
many years later, in the United
States, I was in university, and got
my bachelors and my masters. I
knew I was going to be a teacher,
but with my background, rather
How would you explain to an
outsider the life in Robert College?
So, when you say outside you
mean someone who doesn’t live
in the school or is not connected
to the school?
Not connected to the school.
(Puffing.) It’s very tricky. So, it depends on that person. If I was talking to a person in Turkey, I’d have a
different answer to an American.
Photo Courtesy of Hayatturizm.com
than immediately seeking work in
the United States, I said, “It’s a big
world, I am still young, I am interested in going abroad teaching
somewhere outside of the United
States”. And one of the first places
that came to my mind was Turkey.
I don’t want to make this too long
of a story, but eventually I ended
up getting a job in Üsküdar American Academy. In a way sort of RC’s
sister school, because they both
go way back in terms of history,
although Üsküdar had a different
orientation from the very beginning. Anyways, that was my first
experience of working and teaching in Turkey, and that was when I
got married to my wife who’s from
Istanbul, and it was a good experience for the most part - very
different but quite good. But after
that point, we decided to go and
work in the United States. My wife
got an American citizenship, and
we returned to Washington, D.C.
for 7 years. (I’m returning to DC
now, as that is what I call home).
Think that you’re talking to a
parent who wants their kid in
Robert College. What would
you say to that person?
So, a parent here in Istanbul who
wants their child in RC? I’d ask
them, “Why do you want your
child in RC?” Because it’s a costly
place as elite private schools are.
So, I’d ask what their ultimate
aim was, what they expect out of
this school, do they expect their
child to be accepted by a high
brand university or whatever,
I’d say it’s a very mixed bag. But
I understand why people want
their children to be in this school,
I know what state schools are like,
and I understand parents want-
Left: Mr. Rau on His Way to Home | Right: Mr. Rau in His Office (Photo Courtesy of Robin Carnegy and Ece Toprak)
8
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
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January 2008 Issue
Mr. Rau with His Senior Students (Screenshoots from the Senior Film - RC’15 by Derin Eğrikavuk)
ing their children to have a better school experience than they’d
have there. And why Robert over
other private schools in the area?
- and this would include my answer to someone outside of Turkey. RC is what some people call
a legacy school; it’s been around
for so long, it’s older than the
modern Turkish Republic, and its
intricately bound to the history
of Istanbul for the last 150 years
certainly, and it has produced
some of the best known figures in
Turkish politics, art etc… So, the
reason why it is a legacy school is
because it has a reputation that
it can rest on, even though it has
gone through certain changes. So
there are tremendous rewards for
people that come here. But I know
that RC, like any other institution,
has its problems, that the school
does not advertise, like all other
institutions. And I wish that this
school could be more forthcoming, more open, and more transparent about things. Let me give
you an example, there has been a
certain incident involving a young
person whose family wanted to
get her into RC, with what some
people call a loophole, and using some connections in MEB to
mandate that the student to be
admitted. I think one of the best
things to happen was that the
headmaster let everyone in the
faculty know this was happening. That’s a degree of what I call
transparency. And I think far more
of that should happen. -This is me
being idealistic here- because I
think that a school should not be
like other businesses. You know?
A school is a special kind of place.
A school should exist because of
students and nothing else in my
mind. At the very least a student
should learn about ideals in terms
of education and human behavior
etc… So that when you get out to
the rest of the world, you’re going
to experience bad things. But you
should be able to imagine a better
situation.
What are your plans after
leaving Robert College?
For me, I will continue to be a
teacher as I like to be in a classroom. I genuinely like that. I
know that a high school can be
tricky at times, however I really
like high school students, I like
the age group. So again, my plan
is to teach at a secondary school,
which is what a high school is.
What was your favorite memory with RC students?
God, there are so many. They’re
so hard to pick because I have to
exclude other ones. I have lots of
memories, but there is one thing
that never changed for me that I
really like. Anyone teaching here
in Turkey will know what I am
talking about. This goes all the
way back to Üsküdar, and it has
happened everywhere and it is a
strange phenomenon. I’ll be travelling on a plane, on the airport,
and inevitably I’ll somehow see
students and former students.
And this is not like encounters on
Facebook or Twitter, this is like in
a museum in NY, encounters in
shopping malls, odd ones here in
Turkey. Someone says, “Mr. Rau!!!”
and I’m like, “It’s happening
again.” And often I remember the
faces; most often I can remember
the names too. And let’s say if I see
you again in 10 years I’ll be like,
“Was it Oğuz? Or was it something
else?” It’s not that Turkish names
are hard, it’s just there are so
many. I remember being in Vatican Museum one time with my
family on a trip and I heard this
voice behind me saying, “Mr. Rau
what are you doing here?” And I
turned around and it was a student that I had here in Lise 10 7
years ago. And this happened
about 5 years or so ago. And I said,
“What are YOU doing here?” It happened over the Atlantic Ocean, on
a plane. I’m not lying, I was back
from the bathroom or something
and I am walking the aisle and the
voice, “Mr. Rau!” and I’m like, “Oh
my god I can’t get away.”
What are you going to miss
the most about RC/Istanbul?
I’ve been eating Turkish food since
I was child, so not that. I like food
from all kinds of places and to be
honest, you can find quality Turkish food in NY too from the immigrants that go there. I won’t have
to hesitate about RC, because it
is going to be the students. No
question about that. I’m not saying that to curry favor. If Robert
didn’t get such cool people as students - and when I say cool I mean
smart, clever and mostly humane
- without them this school would
be a beautiful campus that meant
nothing. What I already miss
about Istanbul – and this is me
being nostalgic and getting oldas crazy as this sounds, when I go
out with my wife and my boy and
we have been doing this recently,
invariably we go to the older parts
of the city. I know there is change
and economic progress, but I
miss old Istanbul. I miss institutions. Pamuk writes that Istanbul
has a feel to it that is absolutely
unique. This feel includes some
melancholy, not depression, like a
beautiful sadness of this city that
has been around for so long. It just
seems to be exuded. It’s getting
harder to find. But that feeling of
Istanbul is one of the things I’ll
miss most of this city.
What would you change that
you found ineffective or inappropriate during your time in
RC, especially during recent
times?
It depends. There are so many
different ways I can answer this
question. The thing is, the administration needs to look over their
most powerful resource and it’s
not technology; technology is a
great tool, but it does not create
human capital. They don’t need
to look outside of these walls to
look for new ideas, more humane
ideas, that’s what makes us a
school. And I think if they invest
in human capital, it’ll be better building towards trust. This
school, I think should have the
best morale, feeling of well-being, of any place. Yet I often find
just the opposite is true. There’s
too much under the table, too
much gossip. That’s what I meant
by transparency. Trust and utilize
teachers and students more.
Mr. Rau with His Students
As the school year is coming to an end, the joy of summer and the idea of a long awaited vacation are emerging in everyone’s heads.
Summer is also bringing bittersweet memories for the members of the Robert College Community.
Bosphorus Chronicle wants to bid farewell to the beloved teachers who are leaving
RC at the end of the year and hear about their future plans and what they will miss the most.
We sure will miss them.
JUNE
2012 Issue
Issue
May 2015
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
9
Colorful Socks, Interesting Ties, Purple and Blue Glasses: Philip Gee
Ezgi Yazıcı
M. Miraç
Süzgün
Melis Şingin
After spending seventeen years
in Robert College as an English
teacher, Philip Gee talks about the
time he first came to RC, how he
became a student-favorite teacher and recounts his infamous stories in Robert College since 1998.
Exclusive to Bosphorus Chronicle,
Mr. Gee also gives us a sneak peek
about his speech for RC’15 Graduation Ceremony.
How and why did you come to
Turkey years ago?
Do you want me to tell you the
whole story? Okay, I will keep
it short. I took a year off at the
school I worked at in Sweden and
did a master’s degree. I should
have gone back to the school
where I worked, but I decided to
have a year off. During that year I
got bored, and I started sending
my CV all over the world. I was
particularly looking for schools
where it said they have very smart
children. It’s easy to work with
clever kids. Then I saw this school
advertised in a conference, it was
Robert College, and it said “We
take the best and the brightest.”
Those were the words they used.
I contacted Mr. Edmonds; he forwarded my e-mails. And then,
the school asked me if I would
be interested in working for two
months, because two teachers
were ill. That’s how I came. April
of 1998... and I have stayed here
for seventeen years.
What are your plans after you
leave RC?
I will go to Sweden; my ex-wife
lives there. I need company. I will
definitely travel, but my ex-wife
was thinking about living in Iceland. It is one of the nicest places
on Earth.
Is there anything that you
wish to do before you leave
Istanbul?
Before I leave, I want to go down
to Eminönü again. That region
is my favorite place in Istanbul:
Beyazıt down to Galata Bridge.
How was living in Istanbul for
seventeen years?
PG: Oh, I’ve got so many memories about Istanbul. The school,
Robert College students got better and better. When I first came,
it was very difficult with the old
Lise. But, I’d say, the last 5 years,
at least, students have been much
easier, discipline-wise. Before,
there were some tough classes.
Now the problem is just the computers, kids playing on phones
and computers. Also, the kids in
Turkey never stop talking. That
was a culture shock for me when I
first came from Sweden to Turkey.
In Swedish classrooms the kids are
silent, but here . . . There is never
any silence, is there?
In EkşiSözlük it is written that
you negotiate about grades. Is
this true?
Don’t tell anybody about that.
I used to do pop quizzes, and I
knew who didn’t read the book.
Nobody reads the books now.
So, I don’t even bother to give
pop quizzes. What is the point of
teaching the book if no one has
read it? Anyway, I used to give
these pop quizzes, and I used to
do all sorts of tricks, like I’d give
them the paper and put the questions overhead. Then I would walk
out the room to my office. Then I
would look from the window of
my office, where I could see them
all, running around. They would
be copying and asking each other.
After a while, I would walk back
and make a big noise as I came in
the room, they would all be sitting quietly. I would said “Nobody
spoke? Nobody cheated?”. When I
would start asking the answers,
all the kids that hadn’t read the
book would start giving all the
right answers. But, that was probably the only time they learned
anything, when they asked their
friends. I used to make those deals
as well. I used to go and say “If you
haven’t read the book, admit it
now, and I’ll give you ten marks.”
I wouldn’t give them the points,
but then they would confess that
they hadn’t read the book. And I
always allow students to appeal
against their grade, in writing,
and referring to the marking criteria. By doing this, they examine
their own work and are able to
defend their writing, It’s a great
teaching tool.
So, if you were a student at RC,
would you read the books and
be a “good student”?
When I was in school I was a bad
student, but I did read the books; I
enjoyed reading.
You are an English teacher,
that is why. What about Science and Mathematics?
Science and maths were all zeros,
and also French. I was a very bad
student. I mean, I can count; I can
Janelle Bondor, Philip Gee, Andrea Holck
10
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
Mr. Gee Looking Smart (RC Yearbook of 2003)
do multiplication. I was good at
mathematics and geometry; but
then, logarithms came. I got lost
there. It didn’t mean anything,
and chemistry: never meant anything. All those equations, and I
was like “Ha?”
paintings on Facebook.
But you seem like you are not
very good at technology...
No, I am pretty good at technology.
You have a big collection of
songs, poems, paintings, photographs and you like to show
them to the class...
Really? You came to our prep
class, three years ago, to substitute for a teacher and you
opened your computer in fifteen minutes or something.
Yes, I used to have them as desktop background, remember,
changing throughout the class.
It just makes it nicer, doesn’t it?
The reason is you, it is for your
benefit. To make life pleasant for
you. I played music in the mornings in class. I use Facebook in the
same way; I put nice quotations or
Maybe I was doing it deliberately,
because I was substituting for a
lesson. Probably I was not very
excited about it, but still I believe
technology is very useful but overused. Kids are just learning now to
sit in the room with a computer or
a mobile phone. I just looked out
the window in break time and I
Mr. Gee Holding the Fire Extinguisher in front of the Cafeteria
JUNE
2012 Issue
Issue
May 2015
January 2008 Issue
pen again, so I spent around two
years preparing a speech and two
years writing a letter, refusing to
do the speech.
So, you have some kind of a
speech ready now?
I’ve got the speech, just need to
polish it everyday. I am leaving it
for a while now, when I go back
and read through it, I immediately
see where it is wrong or where it
sounds like a speech. I don’t want
it to sound like a speech. In 2009,
some students said, “You put so
many quotes.” I know what was
wrong with the one in 2009: it
was when I got serious, it wasn’t
good. I have to be serious, but in a
different way this time.
Students say that you are one
of the best teachers at RC now,
is it true?
Mr. Gee’s Famus Mind Maps
saw five boys sitting, all of them
were on mobile phones, but that
is the way that the world is going. I mostly use technology in the
class, but for the last several days
I only used a piece of paper. Those
classes were the two best lessons
I had in Modern Novel course, all
year.
and: “Ah! That’s the way to deal
with them.” I had a trouble with a
boy called Alperen Elibol (RC’15),
and I had to find out how to deal
with him and I read about it. “Ah,
he is an Aries. It’s no good fighting with them.” Alperen and I are
good friends, so it is a very helpful
book for teachers.
On the first day of a school
year, you ask students their
horoscopes and write it
down.
Your mind maps about everything are famous among your
students. How did you start
doing them?
You are an Aries, aren’t you? If I
have a problem with you in class,
I would look at my horoscopes
book. It tells me everything about
the student. When I have a problem with a student, I can read it
When I was in my university’s first
year, I was a normal, mediocre
student. And in the second year, I
read a book called “Use Your Head”
by a man named Tony Buzan. He
gave me the idea of doing the
mindmaps. I went back to college,
stuck in boring lessons with boring teachers -you know what it’s
like- and I started doing mindmaps and it made it all interesting. Then, I’d read books and I’d
copy things from the book. I’d do
them sort of a design, so I could
see everything. And, when I went
to exams, I was able to turn the
pages of the notes in my head. So,
I became the top student at my
second year at (Manchester) University. I noticed the best students
started doing them. Deniz Saip
(RC’15) was always a mind mapper since she met me, and where
is she going next year? Yale?
Is it true that this year’s seniors
(RC’15) chose you to make the
graduation speech?
No, it is Mr. Verbowski.
Really? No. (Mr. Gee laughs)
How was writing another
speech six years ago, for the
Class of 2009?
I can show you the document
and you can see I worked on it
for twelve hours, just editing the
document. I edited it 124 times. I
lost 4 kilos in weight. I lost sleep.
In the end of the speech, Mr.
Chandler (the former headmaster) said “It was torture for me.”
I had begun preparing it in 2007
because I knew that class would
probably vote for me. I spent two
years doing it. This class now, I
also knew this was going to hap-
In the world . . . I’m just kidding.
I don’t really, but I think I am the
best teacher at making contact
with students and understanding
how they feel. I think I’ve got a
gift for being in the classroom. It
is like “I just said the right thing
at the right moment to a certain
person that can inspire him.” I
thought about it a lot, saying the
right word at the right moment. I
thought about great footballers; it
always goes right for them. Why
do they always do the right move?
It is just a gift, isn’t it? They have
been given that little gift, and I
think I got that little gift, for hitting the right moment and saying
the right things and not upsetting
the students, or if I am upsetting
them, to be able to realize it.
If you were to define yourself
with three adjectives, what
would they be?
Considerate (people keep saying
that to me, so I will say that), irreverent, cantankerous.
The Evolution of the Mr. Gee - Actually He Never Changes, But How? [Left: 1998, 2003, 2008] (Photo Courtesy of Facebook, RC Yearbook of 2003 and LinkedIn)
JUNE
2012 Issue
Issue
May 2015
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
11
Finding the Glass Slipper: Farewell to Güler Kamer
İdil Korkut
Zeynep
Sabuncu
Turkish director Güler Kamer is
a beloved person who has been
in charge of our school for many
years. She is known for her eloquent speeches in ceremonies
and kind-hearted behavior toward students. She is also a successful and well-known director
who cares about other people’s
feelings and is open to new ideas.
Unfortunately, she has been ill for
a few weeks, so instead of giving
a farewell interview, we decided
to interview people around her
and learn more about her journey
at Robert College.
Before coming to RC, Güler Kamer was living in İzmir with her
family. The previous RC Turkish
Director retired; at Maria Orhon’s
recommendation Güler Kamer
applied for the job and became
the new Turkish director of Robert
College. Maria Orhon explains: “I
met Güler Hanım at a conference
in Bilkent University the year before she came to RC. She was then
the Turkish director of ACI. She
was a relatively new teacher, but
I really liked her energy and she
seemed to know a lot about education. A few months after that
our Turkish director retired. I said
‘I know somebody who speaks
Turkish and English; she is really
fun and she really likes education.’ At first, she said ‘Thank you
very much. I feel so honored that
you’ve asked me, but you know
my life is here,’ and then two or
three days later she called and
said, ‘I actually asked my family
and I am really interested in the
position.’”
Güler Kamer has had very nice
memories with her colleagues
throughout her Robert College
journey, and she has been a lovely
person to the people around her.
Tulu Derbi narrates, “It was my
first year in Robert College. It was
either December 2004 or January
2005. Her dog gave birth--the dog
that passed away, the mother of
Panda--and I was one of the first
ones to see the babies, and they
were really cute and tiny. Also
one day one of our faculty members ran over a mother cat that
had one kitten. I was looking for
a home for it and Güler Hoca said,
‘I will take her.’ I love her heart.
She has a very big, compassionate heart. She is also passionate
about her job. She loves people,
and she wants the best for people.” Tulu Abla is not the only one
who appreciates Güler Kamer’s
heart. Margaret Halıcıoğlu says,
“Güler Hanım has taught me so
much and she has always been
willing to support and guide me.
We are all learning new things
every day and Güler Hanım has
been a very influential teacher
for me. I also love that one of her
favorite colors is orange!”
Headmaster Anthony Jones says,
“Her high school experience in
Izmir shaped her thinking and
life profoundly. It is not that
she refers to it occasionally out
of some blind pride; it is the opposite: she reconnects to it and
draws strength from her years
there with a deep, heartfelt sense
for the values her school provided
her; the people who gave their
lives to educating her and other
students of her generation; and
the principles for which they
stood. I always marvel at and appreciate Güler when I catch these
glimpses into her past, seeing the
origin of her principles and actions, recognizing how entwined
they are, deep-rooted, life-long,
passionate and steadfast. That is
truly remarkable.” Another person
close to Güler Hanım, her assistant Lora Demirciler, states, “She
is very fair, humane and humble.
I enjoy working with her, and she
is really peaceful. She is the kind
of woman that even though you
make a mistake, she can tolerate
it.”
She is also sincerely loved by RC
students. She always treated
them in a friendly and kind
manner. As Ahmet Kadri Türker
(RC’18) says, “Once she greeted
me in the corridor, even though
she didn’t know who I was. I think
it’s nice and sincere that she cares
about students.” Her energy and
enthusiasm about education reflects her attitudes toward Robert
College students. Every student
appreciates her personality. As
Emre Akşehirlioğlu (RC’18) says,
“She said she was very sorry
that she couldn’t attend my play
because she was ill. It was really nice to know that she cared.”
Whereas Emre Akşehirlioğlu’s
memory shows Güler Hanım’s
sensitive side, Buket Mat (RC’18)
has a fun memory about her. “We
came across each other on the top
of a castle in Greece by coincidence. She was very friendly. She
kissed me without knowing my
name, took a photo and shared it
on Facebook.” Baran Abalı (RC’18)
points out, “Although she is the
director and an important person,
she is not someone unapproachable.” Students also love to listen
to her speeches. İdil Çetin (RC’18)
says, “She prepares her speeches
conscientiously and I can see that
she enjoys her job,” and Meltem
Özge Güneş (RC’18) admits, “I
adore her speeches. They are so
sincere and sentimental that
sometimes they make me cry.”
Although everyone appreciates
her personality, dedication and
hard work, she has other traits
and hobbies as well. Margaret
Halıcıoğlu says, “Güler Hanım is
an amazing classroom teacher. I
wish that more RC students had
had the chance to have her as
their Turkish teacher. She is innovative, very creative, engaging,
and passionate about literature
and film.” She also loves MUN, as
Tulu Derbi states, “Until this year
she attended TIMUN for so many
years, and she loved it.” Another
hobby is writing and collecting
old treasures. As her assistant
Güney Savaş says, “We both love
Robert College Community Will Miss Güler Kamer
second-hand shops. Sometimes
we go there and have so much
fun. We never turn back home
without buying something. She
is also really good at writing. She
has poetry collections and she
loves writing poems.”
Consequently, she loved her years
in Robert College and fulfilled her
responsibilities as Turkish Director. Güler Hanım talked about
being a Turkish director in the
“Memories at RC” prepared by
Levent Keser (RC’07), Cansu Aydede (RC’07) and Levent Tüzün
(RC’07), “Today I feel the responsibility and the pride of being
the Turkish director of the most
respected school in Turkey. I live
in one of those houses that I had
eyed with great admiration and a
little bit of envy on that first day.
I teach the most intelligent and
perceptive students and enjoy my
profession. Who knows, perhaps
I made a subconscious wish from
my heart on the day that I strolled
through this green paradise with
Güliz Hanım… and somebody
heard this wish.” After that she
completes her thoughts with
these two sentences, “In short,
I was offered to try on the glass
slipper that I had left behind,
years ago, in a hurry. And, I think,
it fit me…”
Left: Güler Kamer Giving a Speech at the 2012-2013 Opening Ceremony | Right: 2014 Teacher’s Day Luncheon (Photo Courtesy of robcol.k12.tr)
12
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
JUNE
2012 Issue
Issue
May 2015
January 2008 Issue
FEATURESBOSPHORUSCHRONICLEFEATURES
IBM Watson: A New Era of Supercomputers
Arda Başaran
Tunahan Ekincikli
Especially in the last decade, technology has become an essential
part of our daily lives. Every day
we send tweets, talk to people who
are kilometers away online, do assignments and browse the internet
with computers, play online games,
eternalise our memories with cameras, listen to our favorite bands
with music players, read novels
with e-book readers and even check
the time with smart watches. It is
irrefutable that technology makes
our lives easier in many ways and
therefore we consult it maybe millions of times every day. In fact, the
article you are reading right now
wouldn’t be published without the
devices mentioned above.
Is this the end of the story, then?
Well, according to engineers at IBM,
technology will continue to provide
more inventions that will change
our lives radically, and one of them
is Watson, a supercomputer made
by IBM. In seven questions, The Bosphorus Chronicle decided to find out
what is so important and groundbreaking about Watson.
First of all, what is a supercomputer?
Supercomputers are basically computers that perform at very fast
rates compared to regular ones.
For example, the current fastest
supercomputer is the IBM Roadrunner, and it is designed to make 1.7
petaflops (1.7*10^15) calculations
every second, whereas a regular
computer is capable of making 3
billion (3*10^9) calculations. Of
course, such a great performance
has costs: Supercomputers are
very expensive; their starting price
is more than 6 million US dollars.
Furthermore, they occupy a lot of
space, 15.000 m^2 on average.
Therefore, only institutions and
universities use them. For example,
using supercomputers, researchers
at CERN try to develop a model of
the universe after the Big Bang, climate scientists at universities forecast hurricanes and seismologists
simulate the effects of earthquake
waves. The United States, Japan,
and China are known as the biggest
supercomputer manufacturers on
earth. Turkey, on the other hand, is
believed to have 2 supercomputers;
one is located at İstanbul Technical University and the other one in
Ankara. Last year, Yıldız Technical
University and Huawei made an
agreement to build the fastest supercomputer in Turkey.
What is Watson? Is it a supercomputer as well?
Watson is an artificial intelligence
that was developed by IBM. It is
named after Thomas John Watson,
the founder of IBM. It is a computer system that has the ability
to “learn.” Developed as a part of
the DeepQA research program, the
system is coded in Java and C++.
It can be seen as the second challenge of IBM, the first one being
Deep Blue-- the chess-playing computer that beat Kasparov. In 2004
IBM researcher Charles Lickel came
up with the idea of an even more
extensive and advanced artificial
intelligence: one that would play
and win the game Jeopardy!. In
2005, research executive Paul Horn
supported Lickel and started working on the project for the first time.
The aim was to build a system that
would be able to answer questions
within seconds. In 2010, Watson
competed with the best competitors of Jeopardy! In the end, it left
behind all of its opponents and won
$ 77,147. With this victory, it became the first computer to publicly
understand and analyze human
language.
What makes Watson so special?
The main feature of Watson is that
it can understand and interpret
English in a way similar to that of
a human being. It is a system that
uses analysis, understanding, evaluation and learning algorithms.
It can come up with hypotheses,
look for evidence and come up with
conclusions. This 3-million-dollar
Watson on Jepardy (Photo Courtesy of Ibm.com)
JUNE
2012 Issue
Issue
May 2015
IBM Watson’s Hardware (Photo Courtesy of Hoovers.com)
system can analyze 500 gigabytes
of data in a second! In an article
published in Fortune three years
ago, Watson project researcher Dr.
Saxena explained that considering
that most of the current information of humanity is generated in
the last few years, one can easily
say that there are lots of data that
are not analyzed, and it is not an
easy task to come up with useful
conclusions with all this information. That’s where Watson comes
into play. With its great processing
power, it can scan 200 million web
pages in just 3 seconds.
How does Watson work?
Watson is a cognitive computer,
meaning that it just acts like a human being instead of a regular machine, following very strict mathematical relations and producing
limited answers. Before making a
decision, humans follow 4 steps.
First, we observe the physical phenomena. Second, we interpret what
we observe and what we know to
draw hypotheses. Third, we compare the results of these hypotheses
and evaluate which ones are correct
or wrong. Finally, we make a decision. Watson can take these steps
at really high speeds. Instead of using only constituted data like normal computers, Watson also does
research for unconstituted data
online, like tweets, articles, blogs,
news, reviews, posters, literature,
etc. Of course, before starting to do
web research, it has to be given a
massive amount of data and taught
by programmers to be able to distinguish between different kinds
of sources. Since it is programmed
by experts, it can understand
language. Different than a basic
search engine that looks for certain
keywords, Watson breaks the sentences down by grammar rules and
actually reads just as a human does.
This property makes it capable of
understanding idioms, phrases that
do not make sense grammatically,
as well as jargon that is specific to
certain fields. Finally, when Watson
searches for and finds information,
it does not stop. With the knowledge it has, Watson makes viable
hypotheses and searches for supportive data online. Therefore, it
can constitute probable questions
even before they are asked by humans.
In what industries can Watson
be used?
Since Watson looks for certain patterns, it can easily enhance our understanding and expertise in many
ways. For instance, Watson can help
metallurgists find new alloys by
searching for chemical properties
of elements and building necessary
models. Watson can help researchers trying to develop effective drugs
by considering treatment methods
of diseases. It can help lawyers who
are trying to establish new regulations by providing statistics for
crimes, and even cooks by combining different spices and ingredients.
Researchers at IBM state that there
is an infinite number of ways that
we can make use of the capabilities
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
of Watson.
Will Watson be a part of our
lives in the future?
It has a big potential in both professional and daily life with its ability to understand human language
and its fast-paced analysis. After
all, it can solve very complex problems and come up with solutions or
answers. Also, it may be helpful to
come up with academic benefits.
As mentioned above, in a vast variety of fields Watson has the ability
to work fast. Like a superhuman,
Watson can do the research, calculation or evaluation of thousands
of people on its own. Also, if the
project is developed enough and is
ready to use in professional life, it
could reshape banking and marketing fields. For example, South
Africa Standard Bank analyzes its
client information in order to improve customer services. A recent
development was the release of
Watson Analytics in the last quarter
of 2014. Watson Analytics is a package of effective and visual tools and
services. Its first version is based on
cloud computing and it is being developed for use on desktop computers and smart phones.
What do experts think about
Watson?
There are different views about the
way that Watson works and what
it is capable of. Even though most
people agree that Watson is the
ramification of riveting engineering, there are a few points that experts focus on. For instance, assistant professor Jordan Boyd-Graber
from the University of Colorado
states: “A huge engineering effort,
and very impressive, but I don’t
think it changed the way people do
their research. It would have more
of an impact on research if they
shared their code, but IBM rarely
does that” (Quora.com), meaning Watson will not really change
the way research is done since it
is not an open-source project and
13
therefore will not be accessible
by many. Furthermore, Abhishek
Ghose, a data scientist, states “The
purist in me would argue that this
is a messy system and does not
reflect true AI,” which means that
Watson is based on probabilistic
data given by the experts in IBM,
and it does not have a really complex algorithm.
Watson has a totally different architectural structure compared to
other computers. That’s why several universities provide courses
about cognitive computing and
Watson itself. Maybe Watson will
be the future of computer science. Maybe in the next decade
we will be able to use Watson in
our smartphones, and considering
that there are plans to make Watson understand other languages
as well, maybe Watson will be the
universal artificial intelligence
that actually looks as good as
the ones in sci-fi movies. How far
will it go? This we cannot answer,
but Thomas Watson, Jr. answers,
“How far should it go?” “Our machines should be nothing more
than tools for extending the powers of the human beings who use
them.”
Works Cited:
Ghose, Abhishek. “What do AI,
ML, and NLP researchers think
of IBM Watson?” Quora.com.
N.p., 27 June 2014. Web. 10 Apr.
2015.
Graber, Jordan Boyd. “What do AI,
ML, and NLP researchers think of
IBM Watson?” Quora.com. N.p., 16
Aug. 2014. Web. 10 Apr. 2015.
“IBM’den Bilim Kurgu Gibi İş
Analitiği Çözümü.” Eticaretmag.
com. N.p., 18 Sept. 2014. Web. 11
Apr. 2015.
IBM Watson. IBM Watson: How it
works. Youtube.com. N.p., 7 Oct.
2014. Web. 10 Apr. 2015.
“IBM Watson, karar alma biçimlerimizde devrim yaratıyor!”
Gazeteekonomi.com. N.p., 16 Feb.
2015. Web. 10 Apr. 2015.
Rouse, Margaret. “Supercomputer.” Whatis.techtarget.com. N.p., 1
Sept. 2008. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.
“Watson Projesi.” Kobitek.com.
N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Apr. 2015.
“What is Watson?” Ibm.com. N.p.,
n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2015.
Thomas Watson Jr. (Photo Courtesy of Bloomberg.com)
A Slice of Life, the Universe and Everything: Erkcan Özcan’s Higgs Boson Seminar
Ali Çataltepe
Since time immemorial, humanity
has been curious as to how it got
here. Delving into that question, of
course, has always been hampered
by the need to develop the technology to provide the environment
to do so (not to mention seeing to
our more basic needs), but now
since that standard of environment
has finally been reached, we have
been looking and theorizing billions of years backwards in time,
shrunk the scales of our foci to that
of subatomic particles, or expanded them to encompass clusters of
galaxies. Particle, quantum physics, and cosmology meet at CERN,
the home of the largest and most
powerful particle collider in the
world, “The Large Hadron Collider”,
not to mention one of the biggest
physics powerhouses on Earth. On
March 5th, 2015, Associate Prof.
Dr. Erkcan Özcan, a physicist from
Boğaziçi who also works at CERN,
came to Robert College to give a
seminar on the subject of CERN and
its achievements, focusing on the
nature and discovery of the Higgs
boson. The Bosphorus Chronicle has
tried to provide an insight about
the topics that were covered in the
seminar.
Dr. Özcan began his speech by stating that he wanted to tell the audience “the story of the Higgs from
another perspective.” He went on
to a short introduction to the field
of physics, claiming that there was
“something more than doing plain
technical work” to it, then started
describing CERN.
The Inside of the ATLAS Particle Detector (Photo Courtesy of Nasa.gov)
The Large Hadron Collider Tunnel is 27 km in cirumference. (Photo Courtesy of Cern.ch)
14
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
Most people who have heard of
the facility straddling the border
between Switzerland and France
know that it’s gigantic, and the
figures Dr. Özcan presented regarding its user base were thus no
surprise. The bulk of the people at
CERN consist of independent “users”, members of observer and associate states (the latter group of
which Turkey joined on May 12th,
2015, having observed since 1961
and being slated to become a full
member in 2016, and also having
146 observing personnel on-site)
conducting or observing experiments. It has been said that there
are approximately 10,000 users onsite at any given time. The secondlargest group, way behind with approximately 2,500 people, consists
of permanent staff, working at
CERN full-time. The smallest group
consists of approximately 1,000
contractors in charge of maintaining and constructing on-site equipment.
A large membership is not CERN’s
only distinctive characteristic.
The things developed to make its
discoveries possible (if not the actual discoveries themselves) have
been milestones in technology:
radiation-resistant sensors, faster
circuits, new methods for inspecting archeological artifacts using
non-damaging particle accelerators, and even the World Wide Web
(WWW) are a few of the things to
come out of the facility. CERN also
has a significant place in history as
one of the few “neutral zones” during the Cold War, where scientists
from both NATO and Warsaw Pact
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January 2008 Issue
FEATURESBOSPHORUSCHRONICLEFEATURES
The Higgs Field sticks to heavy objects just like people in a crowd gravitate to popular people. (Photo Courtesy of Symmetrymagazine.org)
countries could freely meet and
jointly work on research. Two Nobel
Prizes have been awarded to the institution, and three laureates have
claimed it as their place of study. It
is irrefutable that CERN fulfills its
mission statement of “pushing the
boundaries of science, advancing
accelerator and detector technology, training tomorrow’s scientists
and engineers, and bringing people
of diverse backgrounds together”.
Following the introduction to
CERN, Dr. Özcan moved on to the
actual process behind discovering a new particle. Describing the
method particle physicists use for
accelerator experiments as “crude”,
he likened the particle collisions
to a head-on crash between two
trucks on the road. The faster the
speed the trucks move at (the more
energy is given to the particles),
the more parts (energy given off
and new particles created) fly off to
be detected by a camera (sensors
and detectors). A few repeats to
confirm the result of an experiment
are, however, not enough. CERN
greatly values peer-reviewing, and
anything reported by one of the six
independent on-site experiment
groups which include CMS, ALICE,
ATLAS (where Dr. Özcan works),
and LHC must be repeatedly confirmed by findings from the others,
which leads to staggering numbers
of people being listed on the paper
of a single project no longer than
a few pages. The list of names at
the beginning of one such paper,
shown by Dr. Özcan, was three
pages long.
The confirmation of the existence
of the Higgs boson, one of the
last pieces of the Standard Model
which describes matter and all of
the fundamental forces of the universe except gravity, was thus not,
as many would expect, a “Eureka!”
moment but a very slow, multistage process. It took three years
for the actual data to be separated
from the background noise, the
findings to be confirmed by independent experiments amongst the
multiple groups, and the newly
found boson to be confirmed to ac-
tually be the Higgs boson and not
something else.
Dr. Özcan also gave a short lecture
on the history of our understanding
of particle physics and how it is tied
into the discovery of the Higgs boson, pointing out some irony along
the way: The adoption, discrediting, reappearance and acceptance
in a new form of the concept of an
immaterial “aether” permeating all
otherwise empty spaces. People
went from the four classic elements
to the periodic table in chemistry,
from motion of masses to the way
light moves in physics, and that
age-old holdover from Aristotle’s
age endured, the scientific community taking the philosophers’
word for it. Even Newton and Huygens, while arguing that light was
a particle and a wave, respectively,
both insisted that it needed aether
to propagate. A.A. Michelson and
E.W. Morely finally disproved the
aether, but a new concept had surfaced by then: the field, a physical
effect permeating the entirety of
space, thought of first by Faraday
to describe electricity and magnetism and used by Maxwell in his
equations. Most quantum physics
theories circa 1960 argued that all
particles were, in fact, fluctuations
in a field, thus resolving the dilemma of whether light was a particle
or a wave. The Higgs field was one
of the theories developed at the
time: a field that, in the same way
a crowd warps in different ways
in response to people of differing
popularity, it (a metaphor Dr. Özcan
used), would “stick” to particles in
amounts depending on their properties and thus give them mass. It
was confirmed by CERN on July 4th,
2012, and actually showed that the
philosophers, in a way, were right
about the aether after all.
The seminar concluded with a
few questions from the audience.
From the answers to these, it was
clarified that the reason the ratio
of matter to antimatter in the universe is so high is still unknown,
but that it is thought that the
equilibrium between the two was
broken when the universe was still
young, that the next big discovery
to come out of CERN is speculated
to be related to supersymmetry
(the theory that for every boson
there exists a heavier “partner” fermion), extra dimensions (not parallel universes, but dimensions of
existence, “extra” dimensions here
refer to those posited by String
Theory and alternatives), and that
the Geneva airport is slated to use
a CERN-developed heat insulation system. Dr. Özcan finished his
speech with a statement on the
virtues of skepticism and caution
in avoiding scientific blunders, and
that what CERN found may not be
the only “type” of Higgs boson.
Works Cited:
“Turkey to Become Associate Member State of CERN.” CERN: Accelerating Science. CERN, May 2014. Web.
25 Mar. 2015. <http://home.web.
cern.ch/about/updates/2014/05/
turkey-become-associate-member-state-cern>.
“The Large Hadron Collider.” CERN:
Accelerating Science. CERN, 2013.
Web. 25 Mar. 2015. <http://home.
web.cern.ch/topics/large-hadroncollider>
How to Hack Your Life with Your iPhone
İdil Çetin
Yes, you read it right: It’s possible to hack your life with only
a phone. But you will need some
applications. Here are some of the
best:
1) Pocket
As their slogan says, “When you
find something you want to view
later, put it in Pocket.” This application allows the user to save an
article or web page to read later.
The app also removes clutter from
articles and allows the user to adjust text settings for easier reading. You can make lists and tag
the items you saved to have them
all organized.
The app is available for OS X,
Windows, iOS, Android, Windows
Phone, BlackBerry, Kobo eReaders, and web browsers, and the
saved articles or web pages are
synced to all of the devices with
this app on it, allowing the user
to access saved articles from different devices. People who have
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lots of tabs open in their browsers will like it even more, because
with this app you can save those
tabs and have a look at them offline, anytime and anywhere you
want.
2) Things
If you’re obsessed with making
to-do lists, this app is the best for
you. Things is an awarded personal task management application
for Mac OS X and iOS. It’s a paid
app, but the price pays off.
What do you want to do Today?
What are the tasks you want to
get to Next? And what do you
want to Schedule for a later day?
Everything has its place. The app
allows you to subdivide your
tasks. When entering new tasks
you can add all important information. You can also tag tasks so
that you can find them more easily later. Things remembers everything so you don’t have to.
3) IF by IFTTT
This app allows users to create
customized “recipe-like” tasks
built around the structure “If this,
then that.” For instance, you can
write a recipe task which saves
that photo when someone tags
you on a photo on Facebook. You
can also see other people’s trending and featured recipes, themed
collections and all-time favorites
that you can install or modify instantly.
Works Cited:
https://culturedcode.com/
things/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Pocket_%28application%29
Photo Courtesy of Gigaom.com
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
15
NEWS&OPINION
BOSPHORUSCHRONICLE NEWS&OPINION
New Homegroup System: Peer Mentoring Program
mentoring is between students,
shy students are more comfortable
in an environment with their peers,
and it is much easier for them to
ask their questions of more experienced students. It is not easy for
many students to make friends in
the canteen during a 25 minute
break. The negative side is that
we don’t have a scheduled topic
for each session, because we believe forcing students to talk about
only one topic might prevent them
from asking a question that they
are more interested in. But this
means that if the students don’t
have anything to discuss, then the
session becomes a little quiet, and
this is not what we want.
Rabia Demirelli
We have had the homegroup system in our school for two years
now. Even though its usefulness
is controversial among students,
homegroup will stay with us every
Wednesday between 09:40AM-10:05AM. Recently there has been
a renovation of the homegroup
system that can be really useful
for Robert College students. This
system was introduced to students
under the name Peer Mentoring
System. It aims to bring inexperienced and experienced RC students together so that younger
students can ask older students
about any problems they have in
RC. This innovation has been really useful for the inexperienced
students, but what is more interesting about this program is that it
was invented by RC students. Buse
Bakar (RC’18) came up with the
idea for the new system during
her prep year, and with the help
of other students such as Çisenur
Geyik (RC’18), her project has become a part of our system.
Bosphorus Chronicle interviewed
both Buse and Çise to find out how
their idea became a real system at
Photo Courtesy of Çisenur Geyik (RC’18)
Robert College.
How did you come up with the
idea?
In the second semester our WOW
teacher, Ms. Oğuz, wanted us to research a topic we were interested
in and then plan a project on the
topic. So this is actually where it
all started. The idea of peer mentoring came to me while watching a TV series called Da Vinci’s
Demons. The main character has
a mentor and that mentor helps
him throughout his adventures. I
realized that this idea could be really helpful for our school because
most of the students probably had
difficulties starting Robert College, and even though it is hard to
find success, every student looks
for it. This is how I came up with
the idea.
What are the positive and negative aspects of the program?
Following the pilot program, from
my friends’ responses and feedback, I realized that they learned
many things about the school,
lessons and teachers. In general
this was what we wanted, creating a peer resource for students to
get information. Also, because the
this program real? How did you
contact the admin?
Ms Oğuz helped me; she said
that she liked my program a lot
and asked me if she could send
my writing about the program to
the Headmaster, Mr. Jones. Then
Ms. Yıldırım was also informed
about the program. Mr. Jones, Ms.
Yıldırım and I had a meeting to
discuss the program, and this is
how I got permission.
If you could change anything
about the program, what
would you change?
I wouldn’t change anything yet;
I think it is a bit early to decide
what to change.The positive feedback we have received is greater
than negative feedback. So before
changing anything, I would likehave another pilot project.
When did the program start?
The program was planned and
ready to start at the beginning of
the year. Until second semester
Ms. Yıldırım and I discussed what
we could do to improve the Peer
Mentoring Program. Ms. Yıldırım
helped me to get other teachers’
ideas and to schedule the pilot
programs. Ms. Yıldırım helped me
a lot in the process and she still
helps me. The first pilot program
began last October and only three
classes were involved, between
preps and 10th graders.
How does it make you feel to
have created something in
your school for the sake of everyone?
It feels really nice. Because as a
shy student it was hard for me to
get used to school, and as I hear
from students how the program
has helped them, I feel like from
now on students will have fewer
problems in school, will have
less stress, and will enjoy school
more.
After you had the idea for this
program, what did you do to make
Mystery of Water Molecules: The Mpemba Effect
Melisa Saygın
Hot water freezes faster than cold
water does; this situation is often
referred as the “Mpemba Effect” in
the scientific community. There are
many sensible explanations; however, they usually skip a few principles
of the behaviors of water molecules.
This unforeseeable heat and temperature situation is only seen in
water molecules; the general reason
is that hydrogen bonds in the water molecules act almost opposite
to all other molecules’ bonds. Even
though the effect is observable,
scientists still disagree under what
circumstances this situation occurs.
The Mpemba Effect has been known
for centuries. It is even mentioned in
Aristotle’s works: “The fact that the
water has previously been warmed
contributes to its freezing quickly:
for so it cools sooner. Hence many
people, when they want to cool
water quickly, begin by putting it in
the sun” (Aristotle). Descartes also
wrote: “One can see by experience
that water that has been kept over
a fire for a long time freezes faster
because those particles that are
least able to stop bending evaporate
while the water is being heated”
(Descartes).
Xi Zhang from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore is one
of the scientists who has suggested
an explanation of this phenomena.
His key point is that hydrogen bonds
bring water molecules into close
Photo Courtesy of Eec247.com
16
contact, and when this happens
the natural repulsion between the
molecules causes the covalent O-H
bonds to stretch and store energy.
Why? Because when liquid warms
up, hydrogen bonds stretch so that
water molecules sit apart; this triggers covalent molecules to shrink
and give up their energy, which is
equivalent to cooling. What makes
water molecules so unique is that
molecules sit extremely close to
each other, that’s why in many other
situations it is easy to see an exception for the H2O molecules. For instance, compressing water is a lot
harder than compressing numerous
other liquids.
Evaporation is another explanation
supported by Descartes. As hot water is evaporating at the same time,
the mass which has to be frozen
becomes less. Monwhea Jeng states
“Evaporation is endothermic, meaning that the water mass is cooled by
vapor carrying away the heat, but
this alone probably does not account
for the entirety of the effect”(Jeng).
In addition, mineral effects in water at different temperatures should
also be taken into consideration. We
cannot be completely sure if it really
has to do with bonding--it may also
be an error.
In 2012, the Royal Society of Chemistry held a competition calling for
papers offering explanations to the
Mpemba Effect (Mpemba). More
than 22,000 people entered, and
Erasto Mpemba himself announced
Nikola Bregović as the winner, sug-
BOSPHORUS
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
CHRONICLE
Photo Courtesy of chargedmagazine.com
gesting that convection and super- Works Cited:
cooling were the reasons for the
Meteorology I.12 348b31–
effect (“Winner”). However, there Aristotle,
349a4
is still some doubt related to the
proposed reasonings. A reviewer Auden, W.H. “Water Quotes.”
of Physics World writes, “Even if BrainyQuote. Xplore, n.d. Web. 12 Apr.
the Mpemba Effect is real — if hot 2015.
water can sometimes freeze more
Philip (April 2006). Does hot water
quickly than cold water— it is Ball,
freeze first?. Physics World, pp. 19-26.
not clear whether the explanation
would be trivial or illuminating” Descartes, Les Meteores
(Ball).
Water is essential to our lives, and
contrary to what people think, its
molecules are some of the most
exceptional ones. There is still much
research related to water molecules-the immense variety of effects,
mysteries, and their connection to
human behaviors and emotions.
As W. H. Auden wrote, “Thousands
have lived without love, not one
without water” (Auden).
Jeng, Monwhea (2006). “Hot water can
freeze faster than cold?!?”. American
Journal of Physics 74 (6): 514.
Mpemba Competition. Royal Society of
Chemistry. 2012.
“Why Hot Water Freezes Faster Than
Cold-Physicists Solve the Mpemba Effect.” Medium. N.p., 29 Oct. 2013. Web.
12 Apr. 2015.
Winner of the Mpemba Competition.
Royal Society of Chemistry. 2013.
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BOSPHORUSCHRONICLEARTS&ENTERTAIMENT
Diary of a Mad Performer
Leyla Ok
The play “Diary of a Madman” performed by Genco Erkal is an ongoing
event in Turkey nowadays. It was a
great opportunity for Robert College students that this important
play visited our school on March
2nd. There were many students that
came to see it but the parents benefited from this opportunity as well
as their children.
Nikolay Gogol was a Ukrainian
novelist and playwright, who was
born in 1809 in a small village to
middle-class family. “Diary of a Mad
Man” is a play written by Gogol in
1842. The main topic of the play is
the hierarchy in society and how it
made lower or working-class people
feel servile and invisible. The main
character Poprishchin, an ordinary
public servant who is constantly
mocked, is in love with the daughter
of the senior official. She is a noble
and beautiful woman and surely has
no interest in Poprishchin. Through
the play, we as the audience watch
the main character’s journey to
insanity caused by his situation in
society. Knowing that the woman
he loves will marry a nobleman and
he will never be able to be at the
top, he first starts to imagine love
letters between dogs and then, that
he is the Spanish king. He also goes
on and on about how it is wrong to
have a woman on the throne, so we
see the perception of women from a
lower-class man’s eyes in Russia in
the 19th century. Eventually, he is
taken into the asylum and is treated
very badly, but he thinks that he is
being coroneted to be the new king
of Spain and the maltreatment is
just a part of the Spanish palace
culture.
Genco Erkal is an RC graduate and a
well-known theatre performer and
director. He first performed “Diary
of a Madman” fifty years ago. When
he first performed it in 1965, he was
studying psychology in İstanbul
University so interpreted the play
as a psychological case. Last year,
when he first proposed the play to
the ministry, he was rejected. About
this, he says the following words:
“This struggle is what keeps me
Ticket of the Play (Photo Courtesy of robcol.k12.tr)
alive. I feel the power again, each
time. Again, with each strike. I can
play any way, also in the street.
Theatre is a life style for me. I can’t
imagine a life without it. If anyone
dares to touch it, I object.” (Radikal)
Scenes from the Play (Photo Courtesy of robcol.k12.tr)
Hidden Secrets of Izmir
Rabia İdil
Demirelli
Summer is already around the corner- again! After another busy RC
year, one mostly needs to relax and
freshen up. The easiest way to accomplish this is to go on a relaxing
holiday. Snugglivng inside the bed
and not coming out for the next three
months seems like a really nice idea,
but there are also many things out
there to do during the summer break.
There are various summer schools,
CIPs, and pre-college programs that
are great options, but these need
to be scheduled in advance. If you
haven’t considered your summer
plans yet, or if you would like to enrich them nonetheless, the hidden
secrets of Izmir await you.
Turkey has so must-see beauties;
they can never be summarized in one
article. One of these beauties, Izmir,
is a unique part of Turkey, home to
many cultural and historical places.
In Izmir, history and leisure come
together; one can wander around the
historical streets at Konak, go swimming at Çeşme and be amazed by
Bergama. Here are some great places
to see in Izmir:
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Çeşme
Çeşme is in the western part of Izmir.
It boasts many different hotels suitable for different budgets. The sea in
Çeşme is hotter than the other coasts
of Izmir, but it must be noted that it is
still colder than in other parts of Turkey. But don’t worry, the chilly water
in hot summer weather happens
to be the best combination. Izmir is
also the optimal place to take part
in sports like wind-surfing. When in
Çeşme, don’t forget to visit the Erythrai Archeological Site if you would
also like to see some historical sights.
Ephesus
Ephesus is the ancient Greek city near
Selçuk, İzmir. It was built in the 10th
century BC and it still welcomes curious tourists. The most famous part
of the city is the Temple of Artemis.
The age of the temple is a controversial issue--some claim that it might
have been renovated or rebuilt later
during the history of Ephesus. Ephesus is not very close to the center of
Izmir, so it takes a lot of time to get
there. Also, the city itself is huge and
it takes a long time to see all of it, so
the wisest thing to do would be to
save two days to see the city.
Pergamon Archeological Site
Izmir’s other famous archeological
site is the Pergamon at Bergamaalso a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Pergamon has a long history, and it
even was briefly the capital of the
Roman province of Asia before it
was transferred to Ephesus (“Pergamon”). The Ottoman Sultan, Murat
III, transported two large alabaster
urns from Pergamon to Istanbul and
placed them on the two sides of the
nave in the Hagia Sophia. Unfortunately, most of the historical ruins
had been moved to Germany, including the Great Altar of Pergamon. For
tourists wanting to visit the city, a
bus from the center of Izmir departs
for Bergama every half hour.
Eski Foça/Yeni Foça
Foça is one of the places that is perfect for enjoying the sea--it is home
Photo Courtesy of Tatilrehberiniz.com
to many small beaches. Foça is separated into two parts, Eski Foça and
Yeni Foça. Ironically, both of them are
really old. Both cities have long marina areas with fish that are incredibly
delicious.
Clock Tower
The Clock Tower is the most famous
symbol of Izmir and it is located at
Konak. Designed by French architects,
it was a gift to the Ottoman Empire
from German Emperor Wilhelm II.
The clock only stopped once, during
the 1974 İzmir earthquake. After the
earthquake, it was renovated.
Kadifekale
Kadifekale is the best place to see all
BOSPHORUS
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
CHRONICLE
the Aegean regions at the same time.
It was built by the order of Alexander
the Great. From the top of Kadifekale,
you can see all of the Aegean Sea and
Izmir. The best way to go up to the
castle is by taxi or car. There are large
picnic areas inside Kadifekale and
also playgrounds for children. Since
2007 Kadifekale has been under renovation and due to that some parts of
the castle may be closed from time to
time.
Works Cited:
“Ephesus.” Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web.
10 Apr. 2015.
“Pergamon.” Wikipedia. N.p., n.d.
Web. 10 Apr. 2015.
17
STATEOFSOUNDBOSPHORUSCHRONICLESTATEOFSOUND
Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell
Cem Töre
Gökçam
Carrie & Lowell is the seventh studio album by indie/folk/electronica
artist Sufjan Stevens. The album is
named after his mother and stepfather, which is relevant because the
album was released only a few years
after his mother Carrie’s death from
stomach cancer in 2012. Unlike his
past work where he mainly based
his songwriting around Biblical references (Seven Swans) and concept
albums taking place in U.S. states
(Illinois and Michigan), Carrie and
Lowell is an introspective collection
of songs in a very un-Sufjan way.
The extremely personal feel of the
album is complemented by minimalist instrumentation, a different
approach compared to the glorious
horns and the beautiful melodies of
Illinois or the electronic background
harmonies of Age of Adz. The entire
production is extremely lo-fi; the
only thing accompanying Sufjan
and his acoustic guitar is the occa-
sional ambient electronic melody
on tracks like “Should Have Known
Better.” The lyrics are beautiful--so
personal that the listening experience almost feels like hearing from
an old friend -- but he also has lots
of stories to tell, and the stories he’s
telling are dark. The album’s main
narrative stems from the death of
his mother, but they did not have
a healthy relationship in the past;
Carrie was a schizophrenic drug addict who repeatedly left Sufjan as
a child: “When I was three, three
maybe four/She left us at that video
store,” (from “Should Have Known
Better”). What Carrie’s death has
done for Sufjan, however, is break
the balance he maintained between
the optimism stemming from his
Anglo-Catholic faith and the depressing realities of his past. In the
most powerful lines from the album, Stevens sings: “Now I’m drunk
and afraid, wishing the world would
go away/What’s the point of singing songs if they’ll never hear you?”
(from “Eugene”). Behind Sufjan’s
soft voice and calming guitar lies a
depressing narrative, and Sufjan’s
intensity here makes the album as a
medium so transparent. “Hauntingly
beautiful” is the best way to describe
this record, and even that falls short
of where Carrie and Lowell stands in
Stevens’ discography.
While Sufjan Stevens’ songwriting
has always been his strong suit, Carrie and Lowell lacks the brilliant and
layered music that accompanied
these lyrics in classic albums like Illinois and Michigan -- and this is not
a bad thing at all. The minimalist
approach emphasizes the heartfelt
lyrics and enhances the mystical
aura around the record. Carrie and
Lowell might be a little too dull or
uneventful for listeners who aren’t
familiar with Sufjan’s past work, or
who simply don’t feel the same way
as I do about his lyrics; however, in
my opinion this album stands in
the same place as an album like Roman Candle does with Elliott Smith’s
discography. The downplay of instrumentation coincides with the
intensity of the songwriting, and
sometimes that songwriting resonates with some people more than
it does with others. Roman Candle
is one of my favorite albums of all
time, and I love everything about
Album Artwork of Carrie & Lowell (Photo Courtesy of Pitchfork.com)
this Sufjan Stevens record, too. As
one of the few “undoubtedly great”
artists of the new millenium so far,
Stevens has crafted something special with this LP, making this an essential listen for 2015.
Score: 9/10
Favorite Tracks: “Eugene,” |Fourth of
July,” “ Should Have Known Better,”
“ No Shade in the Shadow of the
Cross”
Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress
Tuvana
Kankallı
AFerhat Karademir
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, previously titled Godspeed You Black
Emperor! and commonly known as
GY!BE is one of the leading bands
of the post-rock genre, and along
with Constellation Records, a great
supporter of this type of music.
Though on hiatus for seven years,
the band released ‘Allelujah! Don’t
Bend! Ascend! in 2012. GY!BE’s
latest album, Asunder, Sweet and
Other Distress is the second album
the group has released after their
ten-year long break. The band has
been working on this album since
late 2013 and claims it is “arguably the most focused and bestsounding recording of the band’s
career.”The album was originally
an edited version of the live piece,
“Behemoth,” and is said to have
been diluted for the album version. The band, like many postrock bands, is again creative with
the titles of their songs: “Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!’,”
“Lambs’ Breath,” “Asunder, Sweet,”
and “Piss Crowns Are Trebled.” The
splitting of the original live piece
and the editing has, in fact, created the polished “final” version of
the song which has evolved into an
album, though many would argue
18
the band’s live performances and
the spontaneous additions make
the songs better. However, a diluted version of the piece with an
almost perfect sound overthrows
these accusations.
The beginning is surprisingly fast,
for usually a post-rock song takes
a long time to build up, especially
opening tracks. This time, “Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!’”
strikes the ears at full-throttle
18 seconds into the album. The
violins create an almost violent
tone, later supported by Efrim Menuck’s electric guitar. The strings,
at times, create almost oriental
melodies. It’s often thought, as a
post-rock song, to be depressing
and to create a dark environment,
yet “Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of
Light!’” depicts tiny glimpses of
hope and happiness.
The album cover refers to the second song’s name, “Lambs’ Breath,”
which is a drone piece. Like the
cover, the drone piece creates an
almost static, black scale image
in the listener’s mind. The use of
drone pieces on this album is quite
different from the band’s previous
work. The drone pieces were usually shorter and merged into other
pieces. Yet in “Asunder, Sweet and
Other Distress” we hear two rather
long drone pieces connecting the
two parts of the album, successfully creating a desolate image,
the post title of the music, and
the loneliness and the emotional
statelessness. Not the musical peak but the emotional peak
comes in the third track, “Asunder,
Sweet,” another drone piece heavily supported with strings and
drums to create the entrance of
the last and the best part of the album, the heavy hail to destroy all:
“Piss Crowns Are Trebled.” Almost
with a rush, the attack of the violins, drums and the guitar makes
the first seven minutes of the piece
the most depressing chapter of the
band’s history, even overthrowing
“The Dead Flag Blues.”
The album, like the previous “Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!”, relies
not on field records or interviews
but only on the instruments. Creat-
ing the theme without any words,
the album describes a time of neither the future nor the past, yet
both future and the past. Until the
last two minutes, distorted guitar riffs resonate with each other,
building up the pace as the music
shouts away and finally fades into
whispers.
GY!BE’s latest album is a work that
has tried to capture the sense of
emotions with instruments. This
modernized-classical music has
moved away from its own genre,
and can now be considered as a
piece of post-music, a tale that is
from the times beyond music.
Works Cited:
“GY!BE - ‘Asunder, Sweet And
Other Distress’ | Constellation Records.” RSS. Constellation Records,
n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2015.
Left: The album artwork of Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress (Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia.com)
Right: Efrim Menuck, the Guitarist of the Band (Photo Courtesy of Lotsaconcerts.com)
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
May 2015 Issue
January 2008 Issue
STATEOFSOUNDBOSPHORUSCHRONICLESTATEOFSOUND
Wilder Mind, Wilder Band: Mumford and Sons’ New Album
Ekin Vardar
On May 4th, the folk rock and alternative band Mumford and Sons
released their third album, Wilder
Mind.
The band had stated that they
would take a break from music in
2013. Ben Lovett, a member of the
band had said, “There won’t be any
Mumford & Sons activities for the
foreseeable future.” However, in
March 2015, the band announced
their new album. Because their second album Babel won a Grammy for
Album of the Year in 2013, the fans,
listeners and music enthusiasts had
high expectations for the third album.
The second track, “Believe,” was re-
leased a month before the album
and the YouTube video has already
reached 8 million views. The fans
were surprised to hear that Mumford and Sons ditched their signature banjo solos, biblical references,
kick drums and accordions, meaning that there is no longer “Serve
God, love me and mend” or any
other such lyric included in the new
tracks. And fans were shocked to
learn that they would no longer be
able to listen to a brand new Mumford and Sons song with a banjo
solo lasting half of the song.
Mumford and Sons ditched the banjo solos and instead they replaced
these with electronic guitar solos.
The new album barely contains any
element that made Mumford and
Sons famous, and it cannot surpass
the average level of a popular alternative album.
The songs from the album Babel
were much memorable. Even if one
listened to the album only once, one
would remember how Marcus sang
the lyric “I will wait, I will wait for
you,” or the banjo solo in “Hopeless
Wanderer.” However, most of the
songs in Wilder Mind are just vague.
None of them has the impact that a
Mumford and Sons song once had.
Some partitions of the songs feel
like they were supposed to be originally played with banjo and accordion in the background, but at the
last minute were just switched to
electric guitar. “Broad-Shouldered
Beasts” is that kind of song. The
chorus is basically begging to be
sung with a classic banjo solo. “We
felt that doing the same thing, or
the same instrumentation again,
just wasn’t for us,” said Marcus
Mumford, but it feels like the band
is still wilder, making that transition from folk rock. If the band had
worked a little bit more on this new
concept before releasing the album,
we could have heard progressive
and high quality Mumford and Sons
songs. But instead we have an experimental but average, immature
album.
Album Artwork of Wilder Mind (Photo Courtesy of Rollingstones.com)
Waiting For Jenny: The Story of a Year-Long Social Experiment
Cem Töre
Gökçam
Death Grips is an experimental industrial/punk hip-hop outfit from
Sacramento that brought an extremely unique sound into today’s
music since its inception a few years
ago, influencing artists ranging
from Björk to Kanye West to Kasabian and gaining a cult following that
has rapidly expanded every year.
Their first release, a mixtape called
Exmilitary in 2011, was followed
by the heavily acclaimed debut LP
The Money Store in 2012 released
under the Epic Records label, but
because of disputes with Epic, later
releases were all available for free
on their official website. The more
electronically backed No Love Deep
Web came out in 2012, and Government Plates in 2013. The theme of
putting out an album every year
continued in June 2014 when the
band released the first half of a
supposed double-album called The
Powers That B. The eight-track long
effort felt more like an extension
of the same concept, as all songs
were hidden behind a heavy layer
of noise and drone-like Björk samples. With an expected second half
and a new direction, most critics
were intrigued by what Death Grips
was going to do next; however,
one month later they announced
their break-up with a note written
on a napkin. The note started with
the sentence, “We are now at our
best, and so Death Grips is over,”
and ended with two words, “Stay
legend.” They announced that all
tour dates were cancelled, including their tour with Nine Inch Nails
that was going on at the time of the
breakup, but the second half of The
Powers That B was still going to be
may 2015 ıssue
released.
There was a problem, however, as
they never mentioned when the
second half, titled Jenny Death,
would be released. Here’s a quick
summary of what has happened
since then, a story featuring so
many plot twists and cryptic messages that it felt more like the ninth
episode of a Game of Thrones season.
October 10th, 2014:
There is activity for the first time on
the Death Grips Facebook account
three months after the breakup, as
the band announces that the album
is complete and the release date is
coming in a few days. (Spoiler: It’s
not.)
October 31st, 2014:
The release date is not announced
yet, but the cult following mentioned earlier starts finding supposed cryptic clues that point to
this day. Nothing happens.
December 9th, 2014: A video appears on the band’s YouTube channel for the track “Inanimate Sensation.” It’s the first single from Jenny
Death, and this release is pretty
much what creates the whole excitement around the album release
-- it is possibly their best work in a
long time, and in my opinion the
best song of 2014. The sound is
bordering power electronics, and
the esoteric lyricism paired with
the booming chorus brings a fresh,
aggressive dimension to their music that is definitely needed.
popular as fans get tired of asking about the release date and
the question of when the album is
coming out is shortened, becoming
a motto of the wait for an album
that might not exist after all.
December 31st, 2014:
Another false release date.
January 4th, 2015:
With absolutely no warning Death
Grips releases 14 new songs on
their official website. This is not
Jenny Death. however; it’s an instrumental album called Fashion
Week (Soundtracks). The first track
is called “Runway J,” the second is
called “Runway E,” and in typical
Death Grips fashion the fourteen
tracks listed in order read JENNY
DEATH WHEN. The album’s name is
an obvious reference to New York
Fashion Week, starting February
10th. The new release date is finally
here, after 6 months of cryptic messages and abundant speculation.
February 10th, 2015:
Or so we think. February 10th
comes and goes with absolute silence from the band. Around this
time I seriously start considering
writing a piece for State of Sound
about “the mythical Death Grips
album”.
December 21st, 2014:
Same routine of fans finding clues,
this time because the band started
on December 21st, 2010. This isn’t
the release date either. Around
this time, the phrase “Jenny Death
When” has become extremely
Waiting for Jenny
February 14th, 2015:
Another video is posted on the
band’s YouTube channel, one that
features the band rehearsing three
unheard songs and “Inanimate
Sensation.” This is the biggest sign
there is so far that Death Grips
might not be over.
March 6th, 2015:
A Twitter account named @bbpoltergeist tweets that Jenny Death is
being released on March 31st, and
a tour will be announced on March
24th. People quickly discover that
the account has been posting visual concepts from the “Inanimate
Sensation” music video before its
release, and has posted a few photos of the band never seen before.
March 10th, 2015:
A preorder link for the album appears, linking to a Dutch website
where 30 second snippets from
each track can be heard.
March 12th, 2015:
The second single, “On GP,” appears
on the band’s YouTube account;
again, no announcement whatsoever.
March 19th, 2015:
Nine months of plot twists and
cryptic messages lead to March
19th. Jenny Death is fully leaked on
the internet, official release coming soon with the tour announcement.
And here we are. After tens of listens, the only thing I’m certain
about is that listing this album
under a genre is absurd. The album opens with “I Break Mirrors,”
pretty much a hardcore punk song,
followed by the initial single “Inanimate Sensation,” a noise music/
hip-hop blend. There are traces
of genres like punk rock, trap, nu-
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
metal, harsh noise, IDM and so
much more here, and while that
itself is impressive, this fluidity of
styles works perfectly at times, although sometimes it does not.
While the album is usually stellar,
when it wants to bring more aggressiveness, the unusual guitardriven sound the band is using
here sometimes fails, like on tracks
“Turned Off” and “Beyond Alive,”
where the music feels like a lazy
attempt to make “heavy music...
but experimental.” Behind tons of
reverb, odd techniques that include
robotic voices, airhorns and distorted guitar riffs and MC Ride’s incomprehensible rapping, the ideas
sometimes simply don’t work.
Jenny Death feels like a compilation of all the insane ideas one of
the most creative current bands
could put together; when the ideas
click they make absolutely brilliant
songs, when they don’t, it feels like
a failed studio experiment. Jenny
Death works with the rest of The
Powers That B so well when they
sound nothing alike; because of
this, the first half is variations on a
single idea, while the second half is
many ideas trying to coexist. While
the execution could have been
significantly better, the originality and the brilliance of the album
when the experiment works is so
impressive that it still deserves a
high score.
Score: 6.5/10
Favorite Tracks: “Centuries of
Damn,” “Inanimate Sensation,” “On
GP,” “I Break Mirrors with my Face in
the United States.”
This article also appears as an April
2015 post on Cem Tore Gokcam’s
blog: lnssfg.blogspot.com.tr
19
Bosphorus Chronıcle
Lise Live XXXI
Berk Eroğlu
There are various activities at the
school throughout the year: plays,
balls, concerts, mangal nights,
musical evenings, seminars, and
sports tournaments. However, one
of them stands out with the efforts
of many types of students and the
eagerness of an excited audience:
Lise Live XXXI. Lise Live took place
on April 2nd, and because there
were so many groups that applied
to be on stage, for the first time, the
music department considered organizing two separate Lise Live’s. But
in the end only one Lise Live took
place. To give most of the applicants
a chance to perform on stage, the
number of performances for each
student or group was reduced from
3 to 2.
There were many interesting moments in the spotlight on the performance day. During the first half,
there were some excellent performances. One of them was from
the group ‘Ay-İn’, starring Aybüke
Otluçimen (RC’16) at vocal and İnci
Serdar (RC’16) at the piano and back
vocal. It was a great performance
because İnci’s and Aybüke’s voices
harmonized well. Also the group ‘Is-
landust’ played the song ‘Clocks’ by
Coldplay, which is a popular band
and listened to frequently by RC
students. The group also had math
teacher Berna Adatoz at the piano.
The first half finished with the
memorable performance of ‘RC’15
Band Banned’ playing ‘Hoşçakal’ by
Şebnem Ferah. It was a “farewell”
since the group includes seniors
that performed at Lise Live a lot in
the past years and will graduate at
the end of this year.
The second half started with the
group ‘Kafa Atan Yürek Yakan’. This
performance was appealing to the
audience because of the Mexican
hats that the group members wore,
the dances of Can Akdere (RC’16),
the unique rhythmic skills of Serdar Yalvac(RC’16) at the guitar,
and good accompaniment by Kaan
Deniz Volkan(RC’16). The show continued afterwards with the performance of ‘Instant Decision’, which is
a group formed by preps and played
pretty well. The group played the
song ‘Instant Crush’ by Daft Punk
and sung by Julian Casablancas; it
was interesting listening to it from
a female vocalist at this performance. Another noteworthy performance was from ‘Köprüaltı Tribute’.They performed ‘Hocus Pocus’
by ‘Focus’,and even though by most
people it is remembered as ‘the
song in which Fuat Cem Özyazıcı
(RC’16) made weird sounds’, it
should be considered that making
Lise Live XXXI (Photo Courtesy of robcol.k12.tr)
these vocals was really challenging,
but Fuat did a terrific job. With him,
the song was also instrumentally
good, so overall the audience was
entertained by this performance.
The group ‘Steven Korayler’ performed ‘Dream On’ by Aerosmith.
The name of the group was Steven
Korayler because the group combined the names of ‘Steven Tyler’,
who is Aerosmith’s vocalist’s name,
and ‘Koray Demirkapı’, who is a
music teacher at RC, and also the
bass guitar player of the group. This
performance will also be remembered by many because its arrangement, which is done by Efe Ofluoglu
(RC’16), was inspired from the ar-
rangement of Yngwie Malmsteen, a
famous guitar player, for the same
song. The final group of Lise Live
was ‘Yara Band-ı’, who became a
tradition at Lise Live. Nearly all Lise
Lives end with metal songs, which
are in English. Yara Band-ı changed
this tradition by finishing the show
with the songs ‘Yanıbaşımdan’ by
Duman and ‘Şeytan Bunun Neresinde’ by Pentagram. They reflected
the enthusiasm of Lise Live during
their performances. It was noticed
that the bass player of the group,
Emre Türkölmez (RC’16), sat on
a chair during the performance,
but the truth is that Emre was extremely ill during the performance
but didn’t leave his group. All the
members of the group portrayed
the emotion of the songs individually and together, it was really pleasurable to listen to them. The fans
were sad at the end of the performance because the drummer of the
group Tuna Gönen (RC’15) and one
of the guitarists Ozan Diken (RC’15)
are going to graduate this year, so
it seemed to them like the ‘Yara
Band-ı’ tradition is over. However,
Fuat Cem Özyazıcı mentioned that
they will do their best to make Tuna
and Ozan able to play at the next
Lise Live. So perhaps ‘Yara Band-ı’ is
not over yet.
Robert College Class of 2015
20
BOSPHORUS CHRONICLE
May 2015 Issue

Bosphorus Chronicle May 2015

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