Gradzette The university of mANITOBA’S GRADUATE STUDENT Magazine April 2014
Gradzette THE UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA’S GRADUATE STUDENT MAGAZINE
APRIL 2014
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Gradzette c/o The Manitoban Newspaper Publications Corporation 105 University Centre University of Manitoba Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2N2 General inquiries and advertising Phone: (204) 474.6535 Fax: (204) 474.7651 Email: editor@gradzette.com Editor: Ryan Harby Copy Editor: Bryce Hoye Designer: Marc Lagace Contributors: Leila Mostaço-Guidolin, Angela
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Cover: Beibei Lu
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The Gradzette is the official student magazine of the University of Manitoba’s graduate student community and is published on the first Monday of each month by the Manitoban Newspaper Publications Corporation.
The Gradzette is a democratic student organization, open to participation from all students. It exists to serve its readers as students and citizens. The magazine’s primary mandate is to report fairly and objec¬tively on issues and events of importance and interest to the graduate students of the University of Manitoba, to provide an open forum for the free expression and If you have a passion for writing, jourexchange of opinions and ideas, and to stimulate meannalism, photography, or illustration ingful debate on issues that affect or would otherwise be the Gradzette is looking for individuof interest to the student body and/or society in general. als to get involved with the produc tion process of the U of M’s graduate The Gradzette serves as a training ground for students instudent paper. terested in any aspect of journalism. Students and other interested parties are invited to contribute. Please contact The Gradzette currently offers 10 the editor listed above for submission guidelines. cents per word for freelance articles, $7 per photo/graphic used, and $30 The Gradzette reserves the right to edit all submissions for images used on the cover. Freeand will not publish any material deemed by its editorilancers will be added to a contact al board to be discriminatory, racist, sexist, homophobic pool and emailed with potential aror libelous. Opinions expressed in letters and articles are ticle, photo, or graphic assignments solely those of the authors. when they become available. The Gradzette is a member of the Canadian University Interested applicants please send Press, a national student press cooperative with members your resume and at least two (2) refrom St. John’s to Victoria. cent work samples to editor@grad zette.com. All contents are ©2014 and may not be reprinted without the express written permission of the Manitoban Newspaper Publi¬cations Corporation.
Freelance
Gradzette
April 2014
The man who murdered Pluto
U of M visit Niel deGrasse Tyson’s first public lecture in Canada Angela England
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n March 13, the line of over 3,000 people waiting to see Neil deGrasse Tyson’s free public lecture at the U of M’s Investors Group Athletic Centre, wound around the outside of the building, down the street, and passed in front of the Investors Group Field stadium. Tyson, a Knight Distinguished Visitor, is a world-famous astrophysicist who has been called both “the world’s most beloved scientist” and the “sexiest astrophysicist alive.” The Bronx-born scholar has authored 10 books, including New York Times bestseller Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries. Tyson also holds degrees in physics from Harvard, astrophysics from Columbia, as well as 18 honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal – the highest award NASA can give to non-government citizens. This was Tyson’s first public lecture in Canada and he spoke as the featured guest for the weeklong Dream Big event, hosted by the office of Student Life. For students on the Bannatyne campus, a livestream was available in Theatre B. “Believe it or not, there is over a year of planning involved in bringing [Tyson here] and maybe hundreds of emails,” said Student Life
coordinator David Grad. Judging by the full gymnasium turn-out, the effort was worth it. Introducing Dr. Tyson was Winnipeg’s own General Walter Natynczyk, who holds the highest military rank awarded in Canada as former Chief of the Defence Staff, and who is the current president of the Canadian Space Agency. Natynczyk spoke about Canada’s recent space policy, its love of space, and how valuable space was to the economy before giving the floor to Tyson. Tyson started his address by acknowledging that he has “a checkered relationship with [the explanet] Pluto,” saying he wanted to put some of that debate to rest before “getting to the meat of the talk.” Tyson described himself as “an accessory” to Pluto’s demotion, having driven “the getaway car.” This resulted in six years of “hate mail from elementary children.” Tyson went on to explain some of Pluto’s planetary “misbehaviour” and why it needed to be reclassified. He assured the audience that Pluto was probably “happier” in its new category, and finished the topic off by frankly telling the audience to “get over it.” The scientist went on to emphasise how dangerous space is. “There’s an asteroid the size of
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April 2014
[the Investors Group stadium] out there named Apophis” he said. Orbit calculations reveal that Apophis is set to insect Earth’s orbit, and will have a “close approach in 2029,” on a date, Tyson pointed out, that is “April 13 – which is a Friday.” “[The asteroid] will come close enough [to] dip below our orbiting satellites,” and only then will we learn whether “[it] will hit us, seven years later.” And if it did, Tyson continued, “it would create a tsunami five storeys tall [that] will basically wipe clean the entire west coast of the United States.” “The universe wants to kill us, and we have a space program to do something about it,” he
system.” By supporting space programs, it enables people to dream about the future “[and] then the dream-state goes to another place; [that] tomorrow is what technology and science can bring us.” The lecture came to an end with a reading from the book Pale Blue Dot, authored by the late cosmologist Carl Sagan. The passage was a sobering and humble reminder of humanity’s place in the universe. “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all of this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” General Natynczyk had this to say to the Gradzette following the presentation, “I was absolutely inspired by what Dr. Tyson laid out here. And again, I’m just a new student myself to space, my background really isn’t in space [ . . . ] We need to energize the intellectual horsepower that was in this gym today, in order to give them the sense of this need to have a vision and to achieve that vision. To be proud of what has happened in the past, that’s all terrific, but really, we need to focus on the future – that’s a powerful message.” Other events intended to energize and inspire were the rest of the presentations making up the Dream Big event that ran March 10-13. Guests of note who spoke on campus included Zac Trolley, Mars One crew candidate; Guy Bujold, the former Canadian Space Agency president; as well as local professionals, including Igor Telichev, Winnipeg science writer and UFO expert. U of M post-doctoral fellow Harsha Kumar; U of W assistant professor of physics, Andrew Frey; and U of M assistant professor of engineering, Chris Rutkowski, represented the academic side of presentations – each hosting an individual talk. The topics and events covered during Dream Big week ranged from a Q&A on possible careers in space, the Canadian Space Society Fair—hosting displays by the Canadian Forces School of Aerospace Studies and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, among others— to demonstrations of “vomit comets” by Dario Schor of Magellan Aerospace, and exploratory discourse on UFOs and the origins of life through cosmic explosions.
“You can’t just say: ‘let’s go to space.’ You have to build that [ . . . ] You have to earn it in your educational system” — Neil deGrasse Tyson stressed. “I don’t want to be the laughing stock of aliens in the Milky Way galaxy if they ended up learning that we went extinct from an asteroid even though we had a space program that could have done something about it.” He admitted the last comment as being said jokingly, but that it also sadly underpinned the main message of his lecture, which was “a call to action, but also [ . . . ] to look at the dangers of inaction.” Tyson went on to condemn the culture of “Apollo worship” as “necrophilia,” warning against the peril of revering the past instead of working toward building a new future. Bringing out slide examples of foreign paper currency, Tyson showed how certain countries decorated their money with engineering and scientific imagery. Our five dollar bill was one example, with its depiction of the Canadarm – a remote system of robotic arms engineered in Canada for use in NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Tyson worried that without easy access to the sciences, or similar inspiring imagery, “that there [would] be a cost to society.” He added, “You can’t just say: ‘let’s go to space.’ You have to build that [ . . . ] You have to earn it in your educational
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The Gradzette Bulletin Board
The 2014/2015 UMGSA & HSGSA executive council From left to right, top to bottom: Laura Rempel, GSA president; Valery Agbor, GSA VP internal; Faizan Khan, GSA VP external; Kristjan Mann, GSA VP academic; Beibei Lu, GSA VP marketing and events; Chido Uchime, GSA senator; Diba Vafabakhsh, GSA senator; Richard From, GSA senator; Melissa Rabb, HSGSA president; Jessica Forbes, HSGSA VP internal; Sahar Karimzadehnamini, HSGSA VP external; Jordyn Lerner, HSGSA VP academic; Laura Romas, HSGSA VP marketing and events; Patricia Roche, HSGSA VP St. Boniface.
2014 GSA election results Election polls closed at 8 p.m. on March 12, with a total 17.7 per cent of the U of M’s graduate student population casting their votes. The uncontested GSA presidential candidate Laura Rempel won the office of GSA president, while the remaining GSA executive positions were swept by the Graduate Students First slate, including Valery Agbor (GSA VP internal), Faizan Khan (GSA VP external), Kristjan Mann (GSA VP academic), Beibei Lu (GSA VP marketing and events), Chido Uchime (GSA senator), and Diba Vafabakhsh (GSA senator). The candidates for HSGSA executive positions all ran uncontested and successfully won their bids for HSGSA office.
Long Night Against Procrastination From 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. on April 3, the Elizabeth Dafoe Library will be hosting the Long Night Against Procrastination, a free event aimed to provide a safe and quiet study space for students during one of the heavy work periods of the fall semester. Reference librarians and writing tutors will be available to students to help work through their research and papers. Refreshments will be provided at midnight, with prizes drawn for attending students throughout the night. Students are encouraged to bring light snacks, plan their ride home in advance, and bring their student ID for admittance.
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Gradzette
April 2014
Making rehabilitation affordable and fun Researcher Profile: Cynthia Swarnalatha Srikesavan Leila Mostaço-Guidolin
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e have all been there, at the gym trying to accomplish something. We go there to achieve a better life quality, to lose weight, to get stronger, but the recipe is always the same: we have to do many reps of the same exercise over and over. It can become quite boring, right? Imagine now you have to go through a longterm rehabilitation program, having to commit to do long and repetitive sets of exercises to simply recover the ability to perform daily tasks again. Holding a book, opening a door, closing a shirt button, opening a food can, all these tasks can be incorporated into a new rehabilitation therapeutic program that has been developed by U of M student Cynthia Swarnalatha Srikesavan, under supervision of Dr. Tony Szturm and Dr. Barbara Shay, from the dept. of physical therapy at the school of medical rehabilitation. Their research involves developing a computer game based tele-rehabilitation therapeutic platform for long-term monitoring and management of people affected with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis of the hands. Srikesavan’s thesis project is focused on developing a home-based task oriented training program coupled with computer gaming for
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people with arthritis. “It is a very simple computer game, that can be used to assist the hand function. For example, you can analyze the performance when you manipulate an object. Manipulation of objects are usually very difficult for people with arthritis,” says Srikesavan. According to her, exercises are usually given to patients, but there are no studies that can prove that these exercises are indeed improving the hand’s movement. Also, another limitation is that there are no exercises to be done at home. “People have to be able to do things like open a door, button up a shirt and all of this is very difficult for people with arthritis. So we started thinking: why not improve these things? Why not use these activities as exercises for rehabilitation?” Srikesavan and her colleagues have adopted a function-based approach. It means that people can be repetitively trained to perform a specific task. The concept, then, is that patients can perform the same task intensively, until improving it. To achieve results that could easily be translated to the patient’s daily life, Srikesavan defined several categories of objects. They were
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April 2014
assembled based on daily life activities, using objects that are difficult to handle, objects that require a full grip, fine coordination, or perhaps a bent wrist in order to manipulate them. The team put together an assessment of people with arthritis, asking them “What is the most difficult task for you to do on your daily life? ” And most of the participants responded: holding something or fine tasks. “By selecting objects that are suitable for those tasks, we started training people intensively by making them play games instead of asking them to perform certain exercises many times during the day,” said Srikesavan. “If you do the same thing every day, it becomes [quite] boring! By manipulating the objects, they are able to play games that require them to perform certain motions – for example, up and down, circular movements, opening and closing, etc.”
patients participating in the study.” Dr. Szturm also spoke with the Gradzette to provide a summary of their work and explain how such research could potentially help those with more financial concerns. “In today’s society [ . . . ] there is no question that rehabilitation one-to-one works really, really well,” said Szturm. “However, a lot a people don’t have access to that, and most insurance companies will pay for 10 visits and that’s it. What we are trying to do is to increase the access and improve the quality of rehabilitation.” Besides the game-based therapy, the group has been developing tools to quantitatively assess the level of the hand function. Currently, this assessment is done by timing how long it takes for someone to do a simple task. Even the definition of the degree of the limitation is based on a questionnaire containing patients’ answers about what they feel and how hard specific tasks are. “In order to make the rehabilitation more “By manipulating the objects, accessible, we are trying to make it possible to they are able to play games that be done at home,” said Szturm. “However, the require them to perform certain clinician has to be able to monitor you, [they have] to able to evaluate you, to support you, motions – for example, up and to write you a feedback. The way to do that? Computerizing it. Today we have computers, we down, circular movements, have the Internet. That’s the way to do that.” opening and closing, etc.” The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has already seen the potential of their study and their hand exercise-related research — Cynthia Srikesavan has been selected and published as one of the Research Success stories in the CIHR Institute The key to this study was the integration of Musculoskeletal Health and Arthritis of computer games with objects available (IMHA) document titled, “Celebrating the in anyone’s routine. By using an attachable Impact of Health Research: Success stories motion sensor mouse, Srikesavan and the other in arthritis, bone, muscle, musculoskeletal researchers are able to use many common objects rehabilitation, oral health, and skin.” (cans, mugs, books, balls, water bottles, etc.); it There is no doubt that the success of acts like a sensor, as it does not need a surface to Srikesavan’s research will have a great impact work, when people move it, the computer will in many people that today are suffering from capture the signal. different limitations and keep struggling with Excited about the prospects of her work, rehabilitation protocols. Srikesavan states: “Patients can play the games from home. We have a platform set, where patients can use the ‘prescribed’ games at any time, without limitations. They only need a computer, without any special specification, and the mouse – which has been provided by us to all
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Gradzette
April 2014
‘None of the above’ sweeps student election University of Windsor student group executives scramble for solution Travis Fauteux — The Lance (University of Windsor)
WINDSOR (CUP) — Outgoing executives for the University of Windsor Student Alliance (UWSA), representing over 10,000 full-time undergraduate students, are scrambling to make decisions that will determine the fate of the union after the association’s 2014 General Elections resulted in a vacancy of all executive, board of directors, board of governors and senate positions. Just a week before voting began, a group of students concerned about the lack of involvement in the elections — in addition to concerns about the election process itself — began a crowd-sourced, out-of-pocket campaign to encourage students to vote “no” or “none of the above.” By the time the polls opened, the group’s Facebook page had accumulated over 1,000 ‘likes,’ which appears to have translated into a vacant incoming executive. The question has now become “What now?” Current UWSA president Rob Crawford said that there is work to do in the next month to ensure students are not dramatically affected in the fall, but all is not lost. “I’ve met with our general manager and we’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of the operations that the UWSA does over the summer can be completed by our full-time staff,” said Crawford. “In terms of having Welcome Week and doing those events [ . . . ] we have our director of student life who can organize all those things.” “It does mean that the work load is going to be a lot higher for them, but it doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to be able to put on a Welcome Week and continue to offer our health and dental plan, or the other services we offer out of our office,” said Crawford. Holly Ward, chief communications officer for the University of Windsor, has already stated that Welcome Week activities would still be provided by the university, should the UWSA be unable to fulfill those duties. Omar Shahid, outgoing vice-president of finance and operations for the UWSA said that, financially, the UWSA will struggle to get traction during the summer without a board of directors.
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“My understanding is that we cannot do anything financially because there is no board [of directors],” said Shahid. “Let’s say a club wants to ask for club funding [ . . . ] they can’t because there is not a board to approve it. The same thing goes for the Homecoming Music Festival or the frosh week.” “We can’t really do anything [now] unless we have an emergency meeting every day.” As for the students involved in the ‘None of the Above’ group, work to reform the UWSA by-laws and elections policies may be on the horizon. Adam Bednarick, the fourth-year international relations student who founded the group, said that he is expecting more work ahead, but he is proud of what has been accomplished. “I’m sure there will be quite the appeal process and what-not to get through, so we have to get through all the paperwork first,” said Bednarick. “There are some challenges [ . . . ] so we’re going to make sure students’ voices are heard.” Bednarick said the election results were a surprise. “We were in shock,” he said. “We thought we would do well, we thought we would have an impact across campus, we just were shocked at the level of impact that we had.” Bednarick said his group will be digging into the by-laws looking for “weaknesses, irregularities and any faults that may exist” to recommend changes. “I think it’s a sign of the times,” said Crawford. “I think, clearly, students are voicing their dissatisfaction and I think in the long run it could end up being a good thing for the University of Windsor by offering a chance for rebirth.” Crawford is encouraging students to attend the Annual General Meeting. “If we reach quorum [two per cent of members] students. If we hit that, students can actually push forward constitutional amendments at that meeting that would become official,” said Crawford. “That’s the time of the year where drastic changes can happen.”