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Volu me 105 Issue 29
Radiothon will benefit Hawai‘i AIDS cause LYNN NAK AGAWA News Editor
Life Foundation’s mission is to fi ght AIDS in Hawaiʻi and the Pacifi c, and will be featured on the radio this Friday to raise awareness and money for the cause. On Friday, Oct. 8, Star 101.9 is holding its second annual radiothon to help with AIDS prevention, treatment, and awareness. The event, called “Stars Against AIDS,” will benefit the Life Foundation, a local organization that provides free HIV testing and services for those living with HIV/AIDS. “ T here will be live on-air inter views with Life Foundation clients, staf f board members, volunteers, and there will po tentially be an on-air rapid test, the administration of a HI V test and an explanation of the process,” said K andice Johns, event manager. Life Foundation works with 769 HIV-positive men, women and children to ensure they receive proper medical, fi nancial, and emotional care. As of Dec. 1, 2009, 4,015 AIDS cases have been
COURTESY OF MELANIE MOORE
Volunteers staff the phone bank at last year’s radiothon. This year’s event will take place on Oct. 8 on Star FM 101.9
confi rmed in Hawaiʻi. “Star 101.9 has about 70,000 listeners, so it’s a really great way to reach out to people and for people to learn about Life Foundation,” she said. “The purpose is twofold — to spread education and awareness of our services and raise funds for our services,” said Johns. The phone bank will be staffed by volunteers, including students from UH Mānoa’s Public Relations Student Society of A merica (PRSSA) and the National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NSCS). T here will be prizes for those who raise the most money. T he grand prize is a trip to L as Vegas for t wo. “ We’re tr ying to make it f un for the volunteers,” said Johns. “We are encouraging people to call in. It’s a great opportunity to hear directly from people who have been affected by HIV/ A IDS,” said Melanie Moore, director of communications. The Star 101.9 hotline can be reached at 808-853-3232. Donations may also be made online at www.lifefoundation.org.
Early female development linked to height, body fat in UHM study C HRIS M IKESELL Senior Staff Writer Young girls with higher body fat or height have a greater chance of getting their period early, according to a UH Mānoa study presented last Friday. “Most girls are tending to reach menarche earlier these days either be cause of higher nutrition or lower phys ical activit y,” said Vinutha Vijayadeva, the author of the study and a junior
researcher in the Human Nutrition, Food and A nimal Sciences department. “ T hey tend to have more body fat than girls from, say, the 1990s.” Vijayadeva said that she found that both girls with higher percentages of abdominal body fat, as well as girls who were taller, were more likely to experience menarche - their first menstrual cycle - earlier in life than other young girls. The study was conducted over three years with Asian and Caucasian popula-
tions of girls in Hawaiʻi between the ages of eight and 10 years old. One of the challenges of drawing conclusions from this research, Vijayadeva said, is that it is difficult to determine what the correct age is for a young girl to reach that point in her development. “What we are trying to focus on here is the optimal range of girls reaching menarche,” said Vijayadeva. “Reaching menarche early is bad, reaching menarche late is bad, so what is that optimal
level? That is what we’re trying to explain, which is difficult because there have not been many studies previously that have focused on these aspects.” Vijayadeva said that determining a more ideal menarcheal age range is critical because menarche signals the body to begin producing the hormone estrogen. The earlier it occurs, the longer a young woman is exposed to the female See Menarche study, page 3
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Ka Leo O Hawai‘i EDITOR LYNN NAKAGAWA ASSOCIATE JANE CALLAHAN NEWS @ KALEO.ORG
MONDAY, OCT. 4, 2010
Menarche study
K A LEO T H E
from front page
Vinutha Vijayadeva, a junior researcher in the HNFAS department of the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, presented a study that correlated greater body fat and height with early menarcheal development in girls. She found that physical activity had more of an impact than diet on the onset of menarche in the young women she studied. CHRIS MIKESELL KA LEO O HAWAI‘I
hormone over time. Estrogen can be a risk factor for some diseases while being beneficial for others. “When a girl reaches menarche earlier and is exposed to estro-
gen earlier, for a longer duration – for example, if I reach menarche at fi fteen as opposed to reaching it at twelve – that extra three years of exposure to estrogen makes
me more vulnerable to developing breast cancer,” said Vijayadeva. “But (to prevent) osteoporosis, you need more estrogen. It’s a balancing act,” Vijayadeva said.
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Editor in Chief Will Caron Managing Editor Davin Aoyagi Chief Copy Editor Nichole Catlett Ka Leo O Hawai‘i University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa News Editor Lynn Nakagawa 2445 Campus Road Assc News Editor Jane Callahan Hemenway Hall 107 Features Editor Reece Farinas Honolulu, HI 96822 Assc Features Editor Alvin Park Newsroom (808) 956-7043 Opinions Editor Lindsy Ogawa Advertising (808) 956-3210 Assc Opinions Editor Michael Brewer Facsimile (808) 956-9962 Sports Editor Russell Tolentino E-mail kaleo@kaleo.org Assc Sports Editor Marc Arakaki Web site www.kaleo.org Comics Editor Derick Fabian Design Editor Sarah Wright ADVERTISING Photo Editor Nik Seu The Board of Publications office is located Web Editor Brett Hinkle on the ocean side of Hemenway Hall. Assc Web Editor Tony Gaskell Ka Leo O Hawai‘i is the campus newspaper of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. It is published by the Board of Publications three times a week except on holidays and during exam periods. Circulation is 10,000. Ka Leo is also published once a week during summer sessions with a circulation of 10,000. Ka Leo is funded by student fees and advertising. Its editorial content reflects only the views of its writers, reporters, columnists and editors, who are solely responsible for its content. No material that appears in Ka Leo may be reprinted or republished in any medium without permission. The first newsstand copy is free; for additional copies, please visit the Ka Leo Building. Subscription rates are $50 for one semester and $85 for one year. ©2010 Board of Publications. ADMINISTRATION The Board of Publications, a student organization chartered by the University of Hawai‘i Board of Regents, publishes Ka Leo O Hawai‘i. Issues or concerns can be reported to the board (Devika Wasson, chair; Henry-lee Stalk, vice chair; or Ronald Gilliam, treasurer) via bop@hawaii.edu. Visit www.hawaii.edu/bop for more information.
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MONDAY, OCT. 4, 2010
For one prodigy, bananas have broader appeal C HRIS M IKESELL Senior Staff Writer
At 21 years old, junior and Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences major Gabriel Sachter-Smith is already known as a banana expert. He’s been called banana man, banana guy, even a banana prodigy by those who know him in the College of Tropical Agriculture. But professionally, SachterSmith says he’s more of an aspiring amateur. “When I got into banana plants, it wasn’t because I liked eating the fruit, it wasn’t because I wanted to try to grow my own fruit,” said Sachter-Smith. “It wasn’t because of anything other than the fact that I was interested in banana plants.” And they are indeed plants, not trees, as Sachter-Smith is quick to point out - that’s what got him into this whole banana business in the fi rst place.
Spurred on by a childhood bet, Gabriel Sachter-Smith now grows more than 50 varieties of banana plants on the UH student farm in Waimanalo. Here, he displays a Native Hawaiian varietal - its most dramatic characteristic is its orangefleshed interior when ripe.
BA N A N A B E G I N S When he was 14, his fellow classmates at his Colorado middle school didn’t believe him when he told them that bananas did not, in fact, grow on trees, though he had seen them for himself firsthand on a trip to his aunt’s house in Maryland. “All the other kids were like ‘oh, you’re an idiot Gabe, of course bananas grow on trees,’” he said. “I got back (home) and I looked it up in a dictionary and an encyclopedia and online and got all my sources, and proved them wrong.” Sachter-Smith took his investigation beyond that initial bet, however. In July of 2002, he planted his fi rst banana plant in the sunroom of his parents’ Colorado home - a rose banana cutting from Florida that promptly died without the benefit of roots or leaves. Undaunted and armed with more knowledge, Sachter-Smith tried a second plant, a hardier dwarf cavendish cutting, and it survived. Soon his single healthy
CHRIS MIKESELL KA LEO O HAWAI‘I
cavendish turned into a small collection of different varieties from a wide range of sources - some local, some online, but all adding bit by bit to his banana knowledge. “When I had four, five, six, (my parents) started trying to regulate it,” said Sachter-Smith. “They didn’t want me to go nuts and just blow all my money on banana plants. “But there was a point – I don’t know at what point it was – where they said ‘hey, you know what you’re doing more than us,’ where they asked more questions and wanted to know what I was growing.”
MOV I N G T O H AWA IʻI Eventually, his parents’ 100-square foot, two-story sunroom spent the Colorado summers fi lled with 40 varieties of banana plants, along with some of CTAHR’s papaya.
Though he was studying everything and asking everyone he could about bananas from his 8,300 foot high home in Colorado before he left for Hawai‘i in 2007, Sachter-Smith said that back then he often felt like he lacked practical field knowledge. But three years of growing banana plants in at UH Mānoa as one of the founding members of the UHM student farm has certainly helped, along with some more specialized banana training. Yes, banana training. “I worked for a year and a half at the tissue culture lab on campus,” said Sachter-Smith. He said that growing banana plants in a lab gave him an opportunity to see healthy examples of a lot of varieties that would normally succumb to diseases like the bunchy top banana virus, hundreds at a
time sometimes. “You can grow them in test tubes and basically clone them. It sounds really intense, but anybody can do it.” Add to that the fact that Sachter-Smith was invited to attend the 2009 International Banana Symposium last September in Guangzhou, China, as well as the fact that he spent his most recent summer studying banana agriculture fi rsthand in Uganda, and you can understand why he garners the recognition he does. But perhaps the most important thing Sachter-Smith learned from those experiences was something that he couldn’t learn from a textbook or a horticultural hobbyist. He says that outside of developed nations like ours, bananas are more than just something sweet to slice up over your
cereal - often times they are the single staple starch of a culture. “There are places in the world where the word for banana is the word for food,” explained Sachter-Smith. “Often times the question isn’t ‘what are you going to eat today’ because it’s literally bananas or nothing.” That realization gave SachterSmith the drive to study bananas beyond being a mere hobbyist. It shows every time someone asks, yet again, what one would expect people to ask a banana prodigy: what is his favorite kind of banana? He gets that question a lot. “I tell them what I’m going to tell you right now: I’m a terrible judge of banana taste because I really like the whole picture of bananas. Eating and fruit quality, and how you like eating it, to me it’s like one piece of the bigger picture.”
EDITOR DERICK FABIAN
Monday, Oct. 4, 2010 CO M I C S @k aleo.org
7Sketches by Derick Fabian
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puzzles • classif ieds • horoscopes
Monday, Oct. 4, 2010
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Lewis
10/4/10
By Lila Cherry ACROSS 1 Self-confident to a fault 6 Dealt with fallen leaves
11 Donkey 14 Sneeze sound 15 Vine-covered, as college walls
Horoscopes By Nancy Black and Stephanie Clements Tribune Media Services (MCT) Today’s birthday (10/4/10). The universe challenges you this year to fulfill your mission at work and to develop your inspirational capacity. Make stress your internal barometer that measures how close you come to the mark with every activity you deem worthy of attention. To get the advantage, check the day’s rating: 10 is the easiest day, 0 the most
69 Beef source 16 ROTC school WSW DOWN of Washington, D.C. 1 Bay of Naples isle 17 Sources of rowdy criticism 2 Aptly named California coastal city 20 He-sheep 3 Lizard that can change colors 21 The Carpenters and 4 __-Tiki Sonny & Cher 5 “__ be amazed” 22 Jazzy Fitzgerald 6 Severity, in Soho 23 Mother of Don Juan 7 Seagoing “Cease!” 25 Turkey brand 8 About .62 mi. 29 Turkey-carving machine 9 Slithery fish 31 Mine, in Metz 10 Pres. before JFK 32 Recline, biblically 11 Walled Spanish city 33 Play your poker hand 12 Use one’s nose without drawing 13 Rope-making fiber 37 Commotion 18 Boob __: TV 38 & 19 Opener’s next call, in bridge 41 Computer program suffix 42 1997-2003 game show host 24 Pimple 26 Actor Jacques who put up his own money 27 Online zine for prizes 50 Deftly escape 44 How stop signs are painted 28 Country music’s Milsap from 30 Talkative 46 ABA members 51 Like many 32 Experiment site 47 Oration winter jackets 33 Nine-digit ID 49 Colorful plastic footwear 34 “To sleep, __ to dream”: 52 None of the 53 “Huh?” above Hamlet 55 Nike rival 54 Stun gun 35 Chopping tool grip 56 Stumble 57 + 36 CNN founder Turner 58 Santa __ winds 60 All-Pro Patriots 39 Circus safety gear 59 Hawaii once comprised receiver 40 Dinner plate most of them Welker 43 Dinner course 64 Poem of praise 61 Pesky kid 45 Original 65 Game show host 62 Hosp. heart 47 Baseball’s World __ 66 Remus or Sam ward 48 Omega preceders 67 Actor Beatty 49 Leader of the Argonauts 63 Aardvark’s tidbit 68 Cowpoke’s pokers
challenging. Aries (March 21-April 19) -- Today is a 7 -- Your favorite person suggests a plan to test your excitement level. Handle responsibilities first, then devote yourself to private time later. Taurus (April 20-May 20) -- Today is a 7 -- You need personal attention today. Others recognize this and contribute, but possibly not how you imagined. Clarify your needs to get them met. Gemini (May 21-June 21) -- Today is a 6 -- You need to express your views concerning core values. Associates may see things quite differently and could suggest viable new solutions.
Cancer (June 22-July 22) -- Today is a 6 -- What would you really want, if you could have anything, be anything or do anything? Imagine that this is all accomplished. Then what would you create for others? Leo (July 23-Aug. 22) -- Today is a 5 -- An outsider raises questions concerning your goals. A creative plan goes on hold while you sort out the implications. Family members provide key information. Virgo (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) -- Today is a 7 -- A problem could arise if you become overly anxious about tomorrow’s business. Stick to tasks
6 8 Fill in the grid so that every row, every column, and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 thru 9.
Go to www.kaleo.org for this puzzle’s solution.
3 5 4 7 9 6 1 2 6 9
3
1 9 7 8 8 3 2 4 2 6 7
Puzzles will become progressively more difficult through the week. Solutions, tips and computer program at www.sudoku.com
2
5
8 2
EASY
that must be completed today and use your talents. Libra (Sept. 23-Oct. 22) -- Today is a 7 -- You question the group’s mindset. Clarify your reservations with visual aids. Then see if you can connect the dots. If so, then move forward. Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) -- Today is a 7 -- Finalize one more question before you present your ideas to the group. Consider the feelings of others as you add the finishing touch. Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) -Today is a 7 -- Time gets away from you as you’re having fun. Everyone wants to share ideas and stir things up. Don’t
#1
plan on finalizing anything just yet. Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) -Today is a 7 -- You want everything to be perfect. You get more done if you relax a bit and accept excellence. Very little is lost in the process. Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) -- Today is an 8 -- Find out what delights your partner. Then adapt today’s plan to accomplish as much of that as possible. You make stunning progress. Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) -- Today is a 7 -- Your need for recognition can wait until you’ve completed the project. There’s still plenty to do to make this the wonderful piece you envisioned.
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O PINIONS 7
MONDAY, OCT. 4, 2010
Party politics within the primaries
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The issues with bipartisan politics are rarely at the top of students’ priorities. Greater awareness among our gneration might change that. A RIEL MONISMITH Contributing Writer
Though bipartisan politics limits the choices in leadership, it is how the government is run in the land of the free. The candidate who fails to prove him or herself a “true” Democrat or Republican will likely fall short in votes. American politics is always the same story. Two political parties go head to head in a race for the hearts, minds, and votes, of the American public. Parties play a dominant role in major elections and also in determining the primaries within the constituency of a single party. In the most recent Democratic Party primary elections, Neil Abercrombie surprised Hawai‘i residents with an overwhelming victory in the gubernatorial race. He captured nearly 60 percent of
the votes against the initial favorite, Mufi Hanneman. There were many contributing factors to this victory, but the most discussed and controversial issue was the implication that Mufi Hanneman displayed elitist views in his remarks regarding public schools and his emphasis on his own prestigious background. This apparent elitism diverged from traditional Democratic Party values. Democrats tend to favor a stronger central government, with more funding toward pub lic institutions such as schools. Public education is a specifically strong factor in Hawai‘i politics because ever yone is aware of the budgetary problems the system faces now. Most voters agree that the public education system needs improvement.
However, to deride public education while running as a Democrat is a poor choice, because voters may question a candidate’s commitment to “Democratic” values like education. Regardless of party affi liation, it is important to keep in mind the party’s traditional values during a primary. Radical views have a shifting role in elections, depending on public opinion at the time, but to sway from fundamental party politics in a primary campaign is almost the equivalent to candidate suicide. Primar y elections are the waters where the true nature of a candidate is tested. T he voters want to f ind the candidate who will be able to swim with the current of part y politics while of fering enough change to parallel the important issues of their part y.
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Ka Leo O Hawai‘i EDITOR RUSSELL TOLENTINO ASSOCIATE MARC ARAKAKI SPORTS @ KALEO.ORG
MONDAY, OCT. 4, 2010
KA LEO PLAYER OF THE WEEK JAKE CAMARILLO Staff Reporter
Kealoha Pilares Warrior Football Position: Slot Receiver Class: Senior Height: 5’11 Hometown: Wahiawā, Oāhu High School: Damien Memorial High School
COURTESY OF UH ATHLETICS
S en ior slot receiver Kea loha P ila res is K a L eo A t hlete of t he Week for his record - brea k i ng per for ma nce in t he Un iversit y of Hawa i‘ i’s 41-21 w i n on S at urday aga i nst t he L ouisia na Tech Bul ldogs. Pilares had 18 receptions, 217 yards, and two touchdowns. He now holds the school record for receptions in a single game, which was formerly held by teammate
senior Greg Salas. Pilares also set a career-high in reception yards in a single game, which is the seventhbest performance in school histor y. Early in the second quarter, Pilares caught a 7-yard pass from junior quarterback Bryant Moniz to give the Warriors a 17-0 lead. However, the longest run of Pilares’ night came less than three minutes later, when Moniz connected with Pilares once again for a 66 -yard touch-
down pass. Pilares has scored in every game this season and leads the team with nine touchdowns. Along with Pilares, Moniz and Salas had monster games of their own on Saturday night. Moniz threw for a career-high 532 yards, completing 42 of his 58 passes, with four touchdowns. Salas added 10 receptions, 197 yards, and two touchdowns. The Warriors are now 3-2 and 1-0 in the Western Athletic Conference.