Alissa Fingold

The days of over-the-shoulder Facebook stalking and bemoaning the poor Tetris moves of the girl sitting in front of you could be coming to an end. A work group made up of a Teaching and Learning subcommittee of the Academic Policy Committee has developed guidelines for professors to outline the kind of action they can take regarding mobile device use in McGill classrooms. This has led to talks of banning laptops, or at least restricting their use.

Arash Abizadeh, a McGill political science professor, has already taken advantage of the new guidelines by completely banning the use of mobile computing or communication devices in his classrooms, barring extenuating circumstances.

Abizadeh cited multiple studies linking evidence of the use of such devices in the classroom to poor academic performance, greater distraction for users and fellow students, and decreased ability to “digest and synthesize” main points.

Although evidence exists supporting these claims, it could become a problem for students who depend on their laptops take notes legibly and keep them organized. Katherine Barry, U2 chemical engineering, said the use of her tablet PC is essential to staying organized, and the programs are extremely helpful for work pertaining to her major.

“A lot of my classes involve drawing graphs, complex formulas, and pictures,” she said. “The tablet laptop allows me to draw those by hand when needed. I also use a program called OneNote, which lets you take screen clips of any of the content published online. I can get the notes online and insert them into my personal notes to keep everything in one place.”

Some students who use laptops in class, though, admit it can be a distraction. Stas Moroz, U3 economics and political science, said he uses his laptop for certain classes but it sometimes affects his focus.

“Sometimes I’ll check my email and check the news, and when the professor is saying important stuff, I’ll miss it,” he said.

Some students believe the burden is on the professor to keep them interested and engaged. Theo Lyons, U3 political science, noted, “If the professor is boring, then I get distracted, but if the professor is really engaging, then the laptop doesn’t distract me.”

While it may be difficult for some students to give up laptop use in class, it will be seen as a positive for others who take notes by hand and could avoid being preoccupied by other student’s laptops.

“I don’t mind if people just have their Word document open and they’re taking notes,” said Trenton Millar, U2 political science and religious studies. “It’s distracting when they’re on Facebook, and then CNN, then some blog, then Wikipedia and they’re all over the place.”

Greenpeace protesters greeted delegates at the World Energy Congress 2010, a triennial energy summit held at the Palais de Congrès last week, while covered in molasses in an attempt to resemble crude oil—a protest against drilling in the Canadian tar sands.

“The Charest government must announce an immediate moratorium on exploration for oil and gas in Quebec,” said Virginie Lambert-Ferry, climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace, in a press release.

Activists said they were concerned about the drilling process, which increases carbon dioxide emissions and creates excess sulfur deposits, damaging the environment.

The tar sands, however, are viable sources of oil, particularly for the United States. According to Rod Sobchishin, the director of business development at Willbros, a Calgary company that builds oil pipelines, the tar sands are the largest source of oil exported to the U.S. Oil is currently being extracted from three tar sands in Alberta, which account for over 40 per cent of the domestically produced oil in Canada, according to the WEC 2010 Survey of Energy Resources Executive Summary.

After their initial protests, Greenpeace took action through bureaucratic channels on Wednesday. Julien Vincent, also a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace, spoke at a WEC issue session on “public awareness and involvement in decision making.”

He greeted the crowd of energy executives saying, “We are here to remove your social and political rights to operate as dirty energy companies.”

Vincent then explained Greenpeace’s “Energy Revolution” scenarios, which suggest that carbon emissions can be reduced up to 84 per cent by 2050 using renewable energy. The German space agency developed the software that Vincent uses to create models which are then verified by the European Renewable Energy Council and local experts.

Helene Pelosse, interim director-general of the International Renewable Energy Agency, spoke later on Wednesday saying that 50 per cent of the world’s energy could be renewable energy by 2050. This is contradictory to Vincent’s 100 per cent renewable energy scenario.

During Q&A for the public awareness session, a member of the audience asked Vincent about his views on nuclear power, a much-discussed topic at WEC. Vincent replied that he does not support nuclear energy because of its associated dangers. Pierre Guimond, president and CEO of the Canadian Electric Association, who chaired the session, then mentioned that Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, was in support of nuclear energy.

Many other speakers promoted nuclear energy at this year’s WEC, discussing the need to educate the public on the benefits and safety of nuclear power.

“Energy security is in the forefront again,” said Anne Lauvergeon, CEO of AREVA. “Once we build the [nuclear] plant, we know how much it will cost for the next sixty years.”

Petr Shchedrovitskiy, deputy director general of Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom, discussed recent advancements in nuclear technology. Nuclear “fast reactors” are theoretically capable of using spent fuel from thermal reactors and carbon-free generation.

The final WEC press release stated: “included representatives from various sectors of the energy industry and Greenpeace have confirmed that it is impossible to expect successful implementation of projects if citizens are not involved in the consultation process.”

However, Vincent expressed disappointment in the integration of executives and delegates.

“The level of involvement in civil society in this congress has not been what it should be,” he said.

Arts Undergraduate Society Vice-President Events Nampande Londe resigned her position on Tuesday, citing personal reasons.

Londe had recently come under fire for allowing Arts Frosh to run a budget deficit and faced the possibility that AUS Council would impeach her. But she and AUS President Dave Marshall denied that this was the reason for her resignation.

“Confusion has come out of all this, at least the perception is that she resigned as a result of this unfortunate deficit,” Marshall said. “[But] she’s no longer a student at McGill, so she is ineligible to be the vice-president events and she had to resign.”

Marshall also denied that the AUS was planning to impeach Londe, although the decision to do so was ultimately in the hands of AUS Council.

“Right off the bat, even though, of course, as a body we were discussing a variety of different ways of taking responsibility for this, there was no plan to go ahead with an impeachment,” Marshall said.

Londe, on the other hand, never considered resigning, but conceeded that impeachment did cross her mind after AUS realized Frosh had run a deficit.

“I stood by what we did, you impeach someone because they do something unlawful, wrong, or unethical,” she said. “There was nothing unethical about opening up Frosh to more kids or restricting it to first years in the Faculty of Arts. It was a risk that we took in consultation with the Frosh coordinators.”

AUS executives first became aware of the deficit in the aftermath of Frosh. The event, they said, did not actually run over budget. Instead not enough first-years registered for the event to break even.

“From all the information that we had there was no reason to predict that it was not going to work,” she said. “[What went wrong] in my opinion was mostly that we had a stricter policy regarding who was allowed to register.”

In addition, Londe explained that there are no institutionalized procedure within AUS regarding the way budgets are done, and how records are kept to make sure information is passed on to future years.

“It seems that in previous years there was just this sort of idea that it didn’t matter which events were over budget so long as at the end of the year they broke even,” she said. “My policy going out of Frosh was that any event that should be put out there should cover its own expenses.”

As for future events in the AUS portfolio, both Marshall and Londe said they will not be affected, mainly because the vast majority of AUS services are funded through independent fees.

“We did run a deficit for frosh, but the way AUS is run, that is not going to affect the rest of student services for the year,” Londe said. “Also the details of the budget are never looked back at, so this does not mean that the rest of the events are not going to be less quality events.

“I feel [that] people sometimes have a tendency to jump to conclusion and get really agitated about things before having enough facts to have a real perspective of what’s going on,” she added. “AUS is still taking steps towards making sure that no other events this year run a deficit.”

The AUS wiill hold a by-election at their council meeting on Wednesday to fill the VP events position.

Gabriela Gilmour

Gabriela Gilmour

For McGill students, Midnight Kitchen is usually the best bet for snagging a free lunch on campus. But for one week at the beginning of each semester, Soup and Science edges out the vegan cooperative, offering free soup, sandwiches, and lectures by some of McGill’s brightest young professors.

The idea behind Soup and Science, said Faculty of Science Dean Martin Grant, originated several years ago when McGill was in the midst of a hiring boom.

“We hired so well and so fast that we lost track of who everybody was,” Grant said.

As the university hired dozens of new professors each year, various departments held mixers in which scientists would briefly explain their research over wine and cheese or, less traditionally, cookies and beer. About five years ago, those informal discussions grew into Soup and Science, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last week.

Every day for a week, four or five recently hired McGill professors address a packed house of undergraduates—and a few graduate students—in the Redpath Museum’s auditorium. Each professor has three minutes to explain his or her research, after which professors and students line up for soup and sandwiches in the museum’s lobby.

Fitting several years’ worth of research into three minutes is a tremendous feat of concision, which each scientist approached it differently at last week’s event.

Christopher Barrett, a charismatic chemist who researches new ways to mimic organic phenomena, spoke rapidly, giving several examples of the kind of natural phenomena from that inspires scientists—everything from seashells to spiders.

“You want to see the world’s best solar cell?” he asked. “Go take a walk in the woods.”

Barrett is currently working on mimicking one of nature’s least appealing substances: mucous. Human bodies, he said in his brief lecture, often reject artificial organ transplants because of the devices’ unfamiliar metal surfaces. His lab is working to create a synthetic mucous with which doctors can coat such organs.

After the presentations, Grant asked students in the audience technical questions about the information the scientists had just breathlessly spewed. When a student got an answer right, Grant lobbed a rolled-up Soup and Science t-shirt to the lucky undergraduate.

As they slurped soup after the presentations, many undergraduates stood in small semicircles around the professors who had spoken, asking questions about their research.

Getting more undergraduates involved in research is a major goal of Soup and Science, said Victor Chisholm, the Faculty of Science’s undergraduate research coordinator, who has run Soup and Science since its inception. Because most of the scientists who speak are fairly new to McGill, they are also more likely to need help in their labs.

Undergraduate interest in research has picked up since the event began, Chisholm said. “In the last year or two, I’ve got more questions from students about research, even [those] in U0,” he said.

Many students who attended were enthusiastic about spending their lunch hour listening to the scientists’ presentations.

“It’s been absolutely wonderful—probably just one notch below Frosh,” said Alex Geller, a U1 microbiology and immunology student who went twice last week.

Geller, who works in Donald Sheppard’s microbiology lab on campus, said Soup and Science can help undergraduates feel comfortable approaching their professors.

“This sort of bridges the gap between being a student and doing research,” he said.

Students aren’t the only ones who hold Soup and Science in high regard, though. At the end of his presentation, Barrett grinned.

“I learn a lot from these things, too,” he said with a laugh.

You are about to undergo invasive surgery, and the anaesthesiologist begins to administer the drugs that will put you to sleep while he sits in a lab 8,000 kilometres away.

This situation is now a reality thanks to an interface developed by Dr. Thomas Hemmerling and his team from McGill’s department of anaesthesia.

Several years ago, Hemmerling created McSleepy, a software system that automatically infuses anaesthetizing drugs into patients. On August 30, his team operated the software remotely, using an Internet connection to monitor patient body signals, transmit system commands, and video chat with doctors performing the surgery abroad.

“It’s an extraordinary technological development that could be enormously useful to help with anaesthesia in remote locations,” said Fernando Cervero, director of McGill’s Anaesthesia Research Unit.

Collaborating with Dr. Cedrick Zaouter’s team at the University of Pisa, Hemmerling’s group sat at their “anaesthesia cockpit” in Montreal and anaesthetized 20 patients undergoing thyroid surgery in Italy. In addition to using automated systems, Hemmerling conducted a preoperative assessment of the patients using Skype video conferencing, including discussion of patient history and measurement of patients’ airways using rulers held by staff in Italy.

“We had two automated systems communicating with each other [and] communication was controlled through an automated system with us here in Montreal,” Hemmerling said.

From the cockpit, Hemmerling’s team gave the system commands to administer the drugs for general anaesthesia.

“The systems are specifically designed so that they deliver anaesthesia in the safest possible way, probably even safer than if you do it manually. There are many, many safety checks,” he said.

During surgery, laptops showed four video screens monitoring the surgery and various biological signals of the patients, providing doctors with the same information they would have if they were present in the room.

“If for some reason the local doctors don’t like what the automated system is doing, they can always stop it or override it,” Hemmerling said. “Even if communication breaks down, the local automated system would still function during our re-establishment of the connection.”

A particular focus of the test procedure was to determine the frequency of manual overrides or Internet misconnections. Neither problem occurred in any of the surgeries, though.

Hemmerling and other anaesthetists envision multiple potential uses for the combined technology of video conferencing and automatic anaesthesia.

“There is big incentive from the World Health Organization to develop more and more of what we call ‘telemedicine,” he said. “Transcontinental anaesthesia is definitely part of this.”

Many countries in Africa have very few anaesthesiologists. An automated system, Hemmerling said, could make anaesthesia more accessible even in remote areas.

“At this point, we do not have enough specialists in remote areas, even in Canada when you go to rural areas up north,” Hemmerling said. “Even if you are a specialist, you might have to deal with very complicated cases where you would prefer to have an automated system helping you and an expert team as a backup, with whom you can consult in real time.”

Besides helping isolated doctors, Hemmerling said he foresees the possible use of the technology as a teaching tool for training residents and for providing preoperative assessments remotely without having patients travel to the hospital.

Groups in the military and space industries have also expressed an interest in making use of the technology for surgery in locations with few or no specialist doctors available.

Steven Backman, chair of McGill’s department of anaesthesia, emphasized the novelty of Hemmerling’s process.

“You are able in real time to get a lot of biological information about the patient and also control the delivery of drugs over a long distance,” Backman said. “It’s important to bear in mind that it doesn’t replace the anaesthesiologist, but it certainly allows you to provide anaesthesia care with the input from doctors over any distance.

“We’re very excited about this,” he added. “We look forward to seeing how this is going to evolve. It’s very, very new technology.”

The Quebec Student Roundtable (QSR, or TaCEQ in French), a provincial student lobbying group, is gearing up its campaign for the coming school year.

TaCEQ represents the student associations of the undergraduate and graduate students of Laval University, the graduate students of the University of Sherbrooke, and the Students’ Society of McGill University. According to SSMU Vice-President External Myriam Zaidi, the organization represents roughly 65,000 students in total.

“We’ve been working already in conjunction with these associations that are a part of TaCEQ right now,” Zaidi said. “We meet once a month, at a roundtable of the associations.”

TaCEQ, which was started last fall, spent much the last year drafting its bylaws and campaigning to introduce paid practicums for Education students. This year, however, TaCEQ plans on tackling a number of issues facing Quebec universities, including the tuition hikes scheduled to be rolled out in 2012.

“We are trying to get different actors in Quebec to endorse alternative solutions to underfunding instead of tuition increases, whether it’s businesses, university administration, or the government,” Zaidi said.

The coming tuition hikes are being approached in different ways by the different student lobby group, throughout the province. Others include the Quebec Federation of University Students (FEUQ), and the Student Union Solidarity Association (ASSE).

“They all go at it differently to a certain extent just to make sure that they offer something different to their constituents,” Zaidi said. “We will be going at it in the sense that we really want increased government funding for universities.”

This differs from FEUQ’s campaign, which, according to their website, is focused largely on the management of finances in university administrations.

However, there is some overlap when these different groups come together at the Table of University Partners (TPU). “It’s a roundtable of all the partners in Quebec universities. That includes student groups, professors’ unions, teaching assistant unions, and others,” said Zaidi.

TaCEQ is in the process of obtaining recognition by the Quebec government, which would allow them to get government funding. Zaidi is also working on increasing the group’s visibility at McGill by promoting TaCEQ’s English-language acronym, QSR.

Starting as “Safety Day” at McDonald Campus and continuing downtown over the next four days, the second annual Safety Week took place at McGill last week. The event was opened by Principal Heather Munroe-Blum, and included a series of presentations, games, and a closing barbecue.

“Safety Week’s purpose is really to get as much of our information out to the community, and for the community members to know exactly what we do, and who we are,” said Pierre Barbarie, associate director of university safety.

A Safety Week tent was located on Lower Field where tables representing security, emergency measures and fire prevention, and environmental health and safety were accessible to students and staff.

In addition, some student clubs, such as McGill First Aid and McGill Walksafe, were at the tent, as well non-McGill organizations like the Commission for Health and Security at Work (CSST), who showcased what they do for the university community.

“That was a positive for us too, to really get our partners involved in Safety Week,” Barbarie said.

Issues including hostile intruder, ergonomics (health and safety), and self-defence were among the topics of the presentations. Ten different sessions were held throughout the week, which people could attend by registering online.

While last year’s concept was kept the same in terms of what McGill Security offers to the community, Barbarie explained the marketing and advertising aspects were done differently this time around. Emails in the form of “All-notes” to students and staff were used as an attempt to attract more people, and the registration was done through myMcGill, which brought a lot of positive feedback.

“We tried to get out there a little more in terms of trying to attract more people, so we did a little more advertising,” Barbarie said.

On average, attendance increased to 25 people per presentation compared to six or seven last year according to Barbarie. The number of people who came into the tent and stopped at the tables was also greater than it was last year.

“We really want to keep this an annual thing [and] visibility is huge, so we definitely want to increase the numbers,” Barbarie said.