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.

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.

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.

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.”