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Commentary, Opinion

McGill campus is still stuck in the BDS debate

by David Watson on

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If you didn't understand last week's highly technical debate over the constitutionality of the composition of the Students' Society of McGill University (SSMU)'s Board of Directors, you may be in luck. Underlying that debate was an entirely different issue, one much more familiar to students—the dispute over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement at McGill.

On the surface, the Board meeting on Sept. 26 was dominated by a lengthy discussion of whether or not the 12 directors currently sitting on the Board fulfilled the requirements of the SSMU Constitution, which stipulates that four of the members should come from the SSMU executive. Given the resignations of two SSMU executives in winter 2017, the number of executives on the Board had fallen to three, and the vacant spots were filled with Members-at-Large, in accordance with the Constitution.

But, while the debate may have been framed around constitutional issues, the way it unfolded suggested that it wasn't just a debate about the Constitution. It was about BDS. More than any constitutional issue, the whole controversy surrounding the Board of Directors showed how deeply the issue of BDS has become embedded in McGill’s student politics, and the kind of dysfunction that can result.

Upper-year students are by now well-accustomed to the ongoing controversy over the BDS movement at McGill. The latest round of the debate began after the Board’s Sept. 17 vote to ratify the J-Board's ruling on BDS passed with 11 votes in favour, and one abstention. The week after—at the very next meeting of the Board—came the issue of the Board's constitutionality.

This dispute at the Board of Directors is just the latest example of how the BDS issue can tear at the fabric of McGill's student society.

This timing was an early sign that the debate over the constitutionality of the Board had an additional dimension to it. Minutes from previous sessions show that the Board had been meeting and passing motions with less than four SSMU executives since at least March 2017, and yet, the issue of constitutionality was never raised, nor were the Board's decisions questioned. It was only after the decision to ratify the BDS ruling that objections were made to a composition that by then had been in effect for months. Even more revealing is that the charge of unconstitutionality was brought forward by the only Director who had not voted in favour of the previous week's ratification of the J-Board’s ruling against BDS. Although she voted in favour of the ruling, after the fact, Vice-President (VP) Internal Maya Koparkar also agreed with allegations of the board’s unconstitutionality.

The unfolding of the Board's discussion on Sept. 26 provided further signs that the issue of constitutionality was being approached through the lens of BDS. The sensitivity of BDS explains why the subject of the validity of the Board's recent decisions came up early, and often. It explains why the discussion carried on even after SSMU General Manager Ryan Hughes informed the Board that the SSMU's legal counsel had assured him that, while the Board must move to appoint another executive by its next meeting, its composition was still constitutional, if murky. And it certainly explains how a discussion about constitutionality eventually devolved into a director accusing other members of politicizing the previous week's decision, and of sharing information with Jewish advocacy groups.

The BDS movement has been defeated in a referendum and declared unconstitutional by the J-Board, yet it continues to shape debates over seemingly unrelated issues even at the highest levels of student governance. This dispute at the Board of Directors is just the latest example of how the BDS issue can tear at the fabric of McGill's student society.

Prolonging the BDS debate by injecting it into the Board of Directors is irresponsible and damaging behaviour. It falsely undermines the legitimacy of the Board of Directors, and ultimately, hurts students. The institutions of SSMU exist to serve the student body; wasting their time by prolonging a debate that has already been settled by the Judicial Board distracts them from their core duties toward students.

It's increasingly looking like SSMU will be incapable of operating at its full potential until students finally resolve to put the issue of BDS aside. SSMU’s biggest problem doesn’t lie in its Constitution, but in the persistence of this divisive issue on campus.

 

David Watson is a U3 Political Science and History student. He is a (very) minor league hockey player who enjoys music, dogs, and eating entire boxes of Kraft Dinner in a single sitting.

 

@mcgilltribop | [email protected]

 

Arts & Entertainment, Pop Rhetoric

Pop Rhetoric: Selling horror

by Maxime Scraire on

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Three weekends into its theatre run, Andrés Muschietti’s It continued to lead the box-office with an impressive $29.8 million three-day total. Simultaneously, Darren Aronofsky’s mother! kept collecting dust with a meek $3.3 million in its second weekend despite strong TIFF word-of-mouth and Jennifer Lawrence’s star power. Both films are critically-acclaimed, classified horror, and aimed at the same demographic, which begs the question: Why the discrepancy? Simple: Although they had similar marketing, they lie at polar opposites of the horror spectrum.

Ever since the unexpected success of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2015), “post-horror” has slowly been creeping out from the dark corners of the American art-house scene, establishing itself as a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Mood-oriented, slow, quiet, uncomfortable, amoral, and uninterested in clear answers, the movement represents a drastic departure from the loud, exposition-heavy, and jump-scare-riddled horror movies to which the public has become accustomed. Indeed, post-horror wide-releases like The Witch (2016), It Comes at Night (2017), and The Neon Demon (2016) have little to do with the likes of crowd-pleasers such as The Conjuring (2013), Paranormal Activity (2009), Insidious (2011), and their respective sequels. While critics could not be happier, audiences are divided. According to the polling website Cinemascore, moviegoers attributed a “D” average to It Comes at Night, while mother! joined the select club of “F” graded films. By means of comparison, the regrettable 2013 3D remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre scored a C+.

Aside from the fact that post-horror is a more challenging experience than the standard genre fare, the public’s overwhelmingly negative response could be attributed to distributors’ inability to pinpoint the sub-genre’s audience, and the dishonest marketing campaigns ensuing from this dilemma. For instance, take the trailer for Robert Eggers’s The Witch: It features creepy children, possession, hints of bloody action sequences, and paranormal activities. The two-minute, heart-pounding sequence does nothing to prepare viewers for this slow-burning exercise in discomfort. Sure, it is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking. But when one pays $14 for what is sold as a new take on The Blair Witch Project (1999), only to be greeted with Middle-English folktales and carefully crafted stills of grasslands, there is sure to be disappointment.

In addition, there is  widespread debate about what a horror movie should be. Variations on “it is suspenseful […] but in no way horror” riddle the public- review pages of the above-mentioned films. Unfortunately, none of these amateur critics laid down what they mean by “horror.” Likely, most filmgoers have a very narrow definition of the term, one that probably includes the physical presence of a frightening antagonist, sequences that will make them jump off their seat, and multiple bloody deaths. However, that is not what horror, by definition, entails. Horror is defined by “an overwhelming and painful feeling caused by something frightfully shocking, terrifying, or revolting.” As such, horror should be a difficult, disorienting, draining experience. It should push moral boundaries, ask uncomfortable questions, and inspire heated arguments. If that is indeed what horror means, then post-horror is more “horror” than any number of Paranormal Activity sequels.

Distributors are stuck with a dilemma. Either they trick more movie-goers into seeing a film they likely will hate, or they aim at the right audience and pray they make their money back. Personally, I find a third option more compelling: Educate viewers through fair, global marketing campaigns, and keep pushing for wide releases. It might take a while before it pays off, but if they are set on making post-horror a long-term profitable venture, studios have no other option. Maybe then Aronosfky will outsell the reboot of the hour.

 

News, SSMU

SSMU Legislative Council nominates Jemark Earle to Board of Directors

by Selin Altuntur on

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On Sept. 28, the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Legislative Council met to appoint a fourth executive to the SSMU Board of Directors (BoD). In addition, Council discussed their affiliation with the Association for the Voice of Education in Quebec (AVEQ), a province-wide student union, as well as the proposed bike facility project, which would build a high-capacity facility for students, staff, and faculty to lock their bikes in the Shatner building.

Guest speakers propose bike facility

At the start of the meeting, Council welcomed guest speaker Amelia Brinkerhoff, coordinator of Vision 2020, McGill’s sustainability action plan. Brinkerhoff presented a project proposal for an indoor bike facility on campus, located in the basement of the SSMU building. The space would serve as a safe location to store up to 350 bikes for students, faculty, and members of the McGill community, complete with a shower and locker room for those who endure long commutes to campus. Brinkerhoff sought support from Council to move ahead with the project.

“I see [the bike facility] as a really interesting proposal because it’s a very visible and tangible symbol of climate action,” Brinkerhoff said. “If you look at McGill’s greenhouse gas emissions, 12 per cent of our emissions are from commuting activities […] and this might be a tool to reduce that number.”

The proposal was not met with full support, however. Several executives voiced concern about accessibility considering the project would only allow space for 350 students to use it, a small fraction of the number of bikers on campus. SSMU Vice-President (VP) External Connor Spencer echoed these worries, and noted the irony of the initiative, given McGill’s failure to take other sustainable actions, such as divesting from fossil fuel corporations.

“I agree that this [would be] a very visible project,” Spencer said. “[But] I’m wondering, within the McGill climate and [the] sustainability action plan […], when we have a university that refuses to divest from the $70,000 that it has in environmentally irresponsible funds right now, why [would] having […] a $1.9-million-dollar project for bike storage [be feasible] if we are already running out of space for this project and might want to look into getting a new building in the future?”

Guest speaker Kristin Perry, AVEQ

SSMU Council also welcomed guest speakers from Kristin Perry, the Coordinator of Mobilization and Associative Development, Sophia Sahrane, the Coordinator of Education and Research, and Isaac Stethem, the Advisor to the Executive from the Association for the Voice of Education in Quebec (AVEQ). AVEQ is a provincial organization that aims to advocate for the social needs of Quebec’s student population through activism and research. Sahrane discussed AVEQ’s research pillar, and shared its findings on student healthcare access.

“We have [done] research on health insurance for international students,” Sahrane said. “It came out last semester and it talks about [how], if you are an international student or [a friend of one], you would know that their health insurance sucks. They [do not receive] the same standards as Quebec[ois] or Canadian students.”

In 2015, the referendum question of AVEQ affiliation with SSMU ultimately failed to pass, with SSMU continuing its non-voting observer status. Now, Council plans to bring the question of AVEQ affiliation to referendum again next week. Though several Council members expressed worries about the referendum not passing once again, Spencer emphasized that AVEQ’s previous failure could be attributed to a lack of understanding.

“The vote in 2015 was […] split, and most students voted abstaining instead of no,” Spencer said. “So that shows that there wasn’t much knowledge of AVEQ, [and] students didn’t properly know what they were voting for [….] AVEQ has been around for two more years now and is much more visible, so, probably, students would be able to make a more informed decision now.”

Motion regarding nominations to the SSMU Board of Directors

After the guest speakers’ presentations, Council voted to nominate SSMU VP Student Life Jemark Earle to the BoD. At its last meeting on Sept. 24, the BoD discussed the murky constitutionality of its current arrangement of members. With a maximum of 12 members, the Board is currently composed of nine members-at-large and three executives, which does not leave room for the constitutionally-mandated fourth executive.

VP Internal Affairs Maya Koparkar confirmed that if this motion were to be approved by Council, one of the nine members-at-large would need to step down.

“As we discussed in our last Board of Directors meeting, in order for the board to maintain its composition of 12 members, there will be one member-at-large of the board who will need to resign from their position in order for Vice President Earle to take their spot,” Koparkar said.

The vote passed, and Earle was successfully elected to the BoD, effective immediately. The decision was approved at the BoD meeting on Oct. 1, following the resignation of Director Nikolas Dolmat.

Council will meet again on Oct. 12.

OSD Office
McGill, News

The Office for Students with Disabilities provides new assessments for ADHD diagnoses

by Caitlin Kindig on

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The Office for Students with Disabilities (OSD) launched a new Learning Assessment Service in the first week of September that aims to make official diagnoses of learning disabilities like Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) more effective and financially accessible for students. While the standard cost of diagnosing learning disabilities is $1500, the new psychoeducational testing service will provide an assessment for $600, most of which can be covered by students’ health insurance. 

The OSD also plans to expand its support services to include self-directed resources for academic support such as tutoring and one-on-one help. The Office will accommodate students who have yet to receive a Learning Assessment appointment by providing support during the waiting period.

Before this semester, students seeking a diagnosis for learning disabilities had to take extensive tests, pay hefty fees, and wait to be permitted extra time for tests or use laptops in courses that have a restriction. All of these procedures were coordinated through the OSD, which currently serves 2,100 McGill undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students on both the Downtown and Macdonald campuses. The new changes will decrease wait times while increasing student access to advising staff.

An integral part of the OSD’s changes also includes hiring more staff at the Office. According to Teri Phillips, director of the OSD, having more employees on hand will facilitate students’ access to support. 

“My hope is that a greater number of students feel that they have the support and tools needed to succeed during their time at McGill,” Phillips said. “Access and support, in both of these areas, without having to go outside McGill, demonstrates a deep commitment to meeting the needs of our campus from both a student and institutional perspective. These changes represent a financial investment in areas that will have significant and measurable effects on the lives of McGill students.” 

The OSD explains its changes in its “Unit Update,” a document that outlines initiatives at the Office. The Update reported that students and staff considered the OSD’s services to be up to par, but that help for students with physical disabilities had declined in recent years as a result of its shift in focus to addressing students learning disabilities and mental health issues. In response, the OSD also developed a Universal Access Team throughout August 2017, which will focus on assisting individuals with disabilities that affect their mobility, vision, and hearing impairment. 

A recent infusion of funding and investment in the OSD has made these changes possible. In an email to The McGill Tribune, Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Ollivier Dyens explained that the non-restricted Quebec government annual fund helped him secure $1 million funding for the OSD. 

“For the last few years, the government of Quebec gave us a fund that was not restricted, meaning, we could use it for services to students in general to enhance the student with disabilities experience,” Dyens wrote. “Last year, we decided that the most pressing needs were in OSD and that the biggest positive impact on students with disabilities would be to address needs in OSD directly.”

The OSD’s changes come after many years of successfully providing support for students. Alyssa Rooster, U3 Arts, who is diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, praised the OSD for providing her a space to concentrate during exams in past years.

“[Staff at the OSD] were nothing but wonderful and helpful,” Rooster said. “[The OSD] gave me lots of resources. It helps me by letting me take my exams in a smaller room and I get to take stopwatch time, which is amazing so I can take time to calm down if I’m feeling anxious.”

 With these changes, the OSD hopes to improve the academic experience for students suffering from anxiety and other disorders in years to come. 

McGill, News

SWAI Montreal comes to McGill

by Ava Jay on

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Starting on Friday, Sept. 22, McGill University hosted Startup Weekend, an entrepreneurship competition where participants pitched, designed, and polished inventive ideas for businesses within a 54-hour time frame. The competition, held in Thomson House, was the first Artificial Intelligence (AI)-themed Startup Weekend in Canada.

Alex Smirnov, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Dialogue, a virtual care platform that provides customers with video access to healthcare professionals, spoke at the opening of the event about the impact of AI on various industries, emphasizing its potential to change the world.

“It’s very addictive to be part of an intensely innovated group that takes risks, that tries things,” Smirnov said. “I think that’s really the benefit [of] growing the startup community in Montreal.”

Topics of education and mental health came up a lot across the pitches. In particular, competitors Justin Park and Daniel Gauthier floated ideas for addressing common student mental health issues through gaming and identifying mental health risks by tracking the click patterns of Google users through Google images. Park is working toward a MBA with a concentration in business analytics, while Gauthier works as a director for Nuvoola, a cloud-based assistance provider.

After a weekend of collaborating with coaches, attending workshops, interviewing potential customer demographics, and creating prototypes, the nine teams rallied for the final five-minute pitch on Sunday night. The judging committee consisted of five members with extensive backgrounds in tech and AI. Broken down into equally weighted categories, the scoring rubric rewarded ideas based on their execution of prototypes, business model, potential to attract customers, and incorporation of AI.

“I’m going to be looking for the applicability of AI to the project that they worked on,” Ross Goroshin, research scientist at Google Brain, said. “The second thing I’m going to look for is […] how did they collect that data, what kind of information are they trying to extract, whether that process is biased in some way or not, just generally how sane is it, what they’re trying to do.”

Each group received feedback from the judges immediately following their final pitch. The first place winner, ‘Skip the Line,’ showcased an automated interface that allows users to hang up a call while on hold and receive a call back when the other line answers. The judges applauded the group’s successful implementation of their prototype and their thorough research. The idea was the brainchild of Justine Gagnepain, a McGill alumni and application developer at Dynamicly, a computer software development company.

The idea was inspired by Gagnepain’s recent personal experiences involving phone conversations with Immigration Canada.

“I’ve been thinking about my idea for about three months,” Gagnepain said. “I’ve been trying to fight for permanent residency in Canada, and I’ve been put on hold for over 50 minutes [in the process].”

‘Spoken Adventures,' a project that would incorporate voice-activated sound effects in bedtime stories, took home second place in the competition. The judges highlighted the potential for Spoken Adventures to partner with Amazon or Apple. Spoken Adventures also won the Crowd Favorite award, chosen by the volume of cheers from other participants and teams.

Coming in at third place, ‘AllSet’ proposed a ‘chatbot’, an interface that allows users to communicate with a computer in a message format similar to texting. It would provide responses to insurance questions such as “Is my friend covered to drive my car?” Queries would be answered after the bot processed a photo of a written insurance contract. Additionally, the bot would help consumers search virtually for the best insurance policy available at the lowest price.

Although he did not win, Gauthier explained the value of the competition in drawing attention towards the growing AI sector and its broad applicability.

“I realized this was the most exceptional experience, because it’s not about winning the first prize,” Gauthier said. “It’s about creating synergy; it’s more about the human factor.”

As the first place winners, Gagnepain’s team had the opportunity to send a video pitch of their idea to both Global Startup Weekend AI and Startup Canada. ‘Skip the Line’ will be judged in these two separate competitions against winners of other Startup Weekends across the globe.

Editorial, Opinion

McGill residences: More than just a roof overhead

by McGill Tribune Editorial Board on

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McGill guarantees residence for all first-year students under the age of 22. Yet, the conditions of this guarantee are murky. McGill’s residence system intentionally accepts more applications than it has capacity for, counting on cancellations to accommodate all of the incoming first-year students. This year, without enough cancellations, McGill was faced with a housing demand larger than supply. To solve the problem, McGill has partnered with EVO to fulfill its promise of accommodation for all first years who wish to live in university housing. Overflow students were finally notified of their new housing arrangement in mid-August, after waiting on a “temporary housing status” for months.

Faced with limited resources, it is important that McGill does whatever it can to fulfill its promise of a residence community for all first years. Living in residence is a foundational experience—particularly for out-of-province and international students—and its significance goes far beyond the necessity of having a place to sleep. For students leaving home for the first time, knowing that they’ll have access to a residence hall with built-in support systems is a crucial source of comfort. First-year students in residence have access to a Floor Fellow to help them navigate the ups and downs of university life. For many, residence is an important way to get integrated into social life at McGill. From Saturday brunches in the cafeteria to hanging out in the common room, from study nights and floor teas to planned inter-residence events, living in residence allows students to build lifelong friendships.

For all students in residence, this community is the first environment at McGill that they will call home. As such, McGill must address student housing situations not only with care for the base-level expectations of guaranteed first-year housing, but also an understanding of the importance of residence as an introduction to university life for so many students.

McGill offers a diverse range of housing in order to accommodate the personal living preferences of all students. From dorm-style, to hotel-style, to apartment-style residences, McGill ensures that students are able to select the living environment that will make them feel the most comfortable. McGill’s unique selection of residence options allows for a diversity of residence communities. However, the discrepancies between housing options are also matched by a discrepancy in price, not to mention that McGill has the most expensive residences in Canada—costs range from around $9,000 per eight months to live in the Upper Residences to over $11,500 for a room in La Citadelle.

While the cost scale allows students to select which residences best fit their lifestyles and budgets, unfortunately there is no promise that students will receive their first choice. Some may be unable to afford the steep costs of the hotel-style residences, and as such, opt for Upper Rez or University Hall for their residence selection. Students who have been moved into EVO this year are paying $1,100 per month for a double room.

By giving students support and resources, a place to gather and eat, and the opportunity to build foundational friendships, McGill residences provide first-year students with the ideal jumping point to begin life at university. McGill must keep in mind that the comfort of residence goes beyond having a place to sleep.

Given the volume of applications McGill receives, students may be placed in residences outside their comfort or price range. While it is understandable that the university is not able to give every student their first choice, McGill must consider financial accessibility when placing students in the more costly halls. Given the lasting significance of first-year residence over the course of a student’s entire university career, McGill should seek to make this experience accessible to as many students as possible. This includes finding a more long-term solution for meeting student demand for residence rooms in recent years.

In moving this year’s surplus of students into EVO, McGill did what it could given limited resources. Still, it is crucial that the university communicate to future tenants where they will be living in a way that gives them more than a few weeks’ advance notice. This certainty is essential for students undergoing such an exciting—but potentially unsettling—transition. The McGill administration must treat students with this sensitivity in mind. While it is understandably difficult to predict the demand for residence on a year-by-year basis, McGill must have legitimate back-up plans well in advance, so as not to leave any incoming first years in the dark until just a few weeks before the start of classes.

By giving students support and resources, a place to gather and eat, and the opportunity to build foundational friendships, McGill residences provide first-year students with the ideal jumping point to begin life at university. McGill must keep in mind that the comfort of residence goes beyond having a place to sleep.

Arts & Entertainment, Film and TV

‘Resurrecting Hassan’ offers no easy answers

by Leo Stillinger on

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On Sept. 22, Cinema du Parc opened showings for Resurrecting Hassan, a documentary of local interest. Directed by Chilean-Canadian filmmaker Carlo Guillermo Proto, Resurrecting Hassan tells the story of a Montreal family coping with the loss of a child. Unflinching and quietly compassionate, Proto’s film is an examination of grief, and the ways we look back and struggle to move forward. It is also a reminder that, unlike in movies, real life rarely provides a simple happy ending.

Resurrecting Hassan follows the lives of Denis Harting, Peggy Roux, and their adult daughter Lauviah. All three are blind, and they make their living by singing for donations in the Montreal metro. Their lives, however, seem to revolve primarily around Denis and Peggy’s second child, Hassan, who drowned in 2002 at the age of six. The family has falls under the sway of a Russian mystic Grigory Petrovich Grabavoy and his community of followers, who believe in organ regeneration as a way to reach immortality. Denis and Peggy decide to attempt the ultimate form of organ regeneration: Resurrection. As Peggy says with a wry grin, “Even the esoteric community isn’t so keen on the idea.” 

The film moves slowly and quietly, doing its best to immerse its viewers into the family’s world of lonely metro stations and supernatural seminars. The Hartings are humorously engaging subjects, and their faces are very expressive. Proto is a perceptive cameraman, and the film’s best moments come when he captures off-hand moments of tenderness or beauty, such as Lauviah playing with the family cat. The scenes depicting performances in the metro are memorable, both for the power of the Hartings’ voices and because of the rare optimism they evoke.

As the film goes on and resurrection proves difficult, the faces of the family come to be animated less by laughter or hope and more by bitter argument. During a brutal shouting match, Proto’s camera remains unblinking, even though the viewers, like the bystanders in the metro, would prefer to avert their gaze.

The subtext in these arguments is the loss of Hassan, whose absence permeates every scene. The Hartungs are very open, reminiscing about the day he drowned and disarmingly wondering what age he’ll be when he returns to life. In their very preoccupation with Hassan, however, and their desperate faith that his resurrection will succeed, they reveal the force with which they are still feeling his loss, years later.   

Real life does not always go in expected directions, and the same holds true for documentary films. Halfway through, Resurrecting Hassan takes a surprising turn when Peggy encounters a new love interest—Philippe, a blind Frenchman she meets in a supernatural WhatsApp group (she and Denis have an open relationship). Slowly, the film turns away from resurrection, and towards Peggy and Denis’ crumbling relationship, as Peggy begins a long-distance romance with Philippe, and Denis begins to fear living alone. Hassan’s presence is still felt, but more subtly; if the first part of the film is about mourning, the second half explores the prospect of moving on—or, rather, the failure to do so. 

Resurrecting Hassan is a difficult movie, and it’s rarely enjoyable. It offers no easy answers. Rather than entertain, Proto wants to communicate the lived experience of his subjects: Grief and loneliness on the margins of Montreal society, and momentary redemption in the form of music or romance. He successfully paints a painfully real portrait of human loss and the way it quietly ripples across the months and years that pass.    

ABCs of Science, Science & Technology

La vie en jaune: Preventing damage caused by blue light

by Selen Ercan on

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Midterm season is approaching, and with it, many hours of studying. After long periods of staring at a laptop screen, eye strain can break focus levels. Two factors cause this deterioration in focus: Intense concentration on an object within close proximity of our eyes, and the ‘glare’ of the blue light emitted from laptop screens.

“Light is the stimulus of the retina but can also have a detrimental effect on our eyes depending on its intensity, direction, and composition,” Pierre Lachapelle, professor in the McGill Department of Ophthalmology and researcher at RI-MUHC, said. “Blue light is more damaging to the retina than red light. That has been known for years.”  

However, he attributes  intense focus on the laptop or phone at hand equally as responsible for damage.

“When you are focused on a screen, the muscles in your eyes are constantly contracted,”  Lachapelle said.

“This muscle contraction is unnatural, and therefore very tiring, especially when […] prolonged.”

Blue light coming from our screens has higher energy and shorter wavelengths that reach deeper into the retina—cumulatively causing more damage. For this reason, screens have an eerie glow at night compared to our surroundings.

Both for work and for pleasure, students’ dependency on screens is inescapable. Because swearing off electronics before bedtime during exam season represents an impossible task, Lachapelle provided a couple tricks to help lighten eye strain.

“What [I would] suggest is to look at a target 10 metres away from you from time to time,” Lachapelle said. “This way, you are giving your eyes a break from concentrating on a screen which is usually within 30 centimetres of your face, which is really close.”

This action counteracts some of the strain caused by the proximity of the screen and the intensity of our concentration.

Mediating the ‘glare effect’ of blue light requires changing the shorter wavelengths to longer ones—or reducing the amount of blue light in the screens. Lachapelle’s advice is to wear a yellow spectacle to filter out shorter wavelengths. Apps like F.lux can provide this service.

F.lux applies a filter to the light from your computer, adapting it to the user’s local time of day. This feature automatically allows laptop screens to blend into the colors of light emitted by their surroundings. At night, F.lux adds red undertones to the backlight of screens in order to omit the blue—and shorter—wavelengths of light. The screen’s light looks ‘softer’ and more yellow, so there is significantly less eye strain and glare from the screen. The effect makes reading long articles or typing for extended periods of time less damaging to one’s retinal health. Furthermore, apps like F.lux make concentrating easier, since the eyes tire more slowly. However, young students have an advantage over older students.

Young eyes can adapt more easily to changing light conditions than older individuals.

“As we age, the ability of the eye to accommodate [to] different lighting situations deteriorates, so an older person would probably have more fatigue than a college student,” Lachapelle explained.

We cannot abuse this advantage though—because young people are not immune to eye strain and fatigue.

The long-term effects of prolonged exposure to screens remain a mystery. Perhaps screens will cause degeneration of the retina, or perhaps not. For now, these short-term solutions help minimize the negative effects of blue light on health—particularly during exam season.

Features

The irony of social media

by Grace Bahler on

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If there’s one word to describe our generation, it’s ‘connected.’ We’re connected to each other, to events, to pop culture—and it is all a mere touch-screen away. We have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ who like our posts and pictures—but something is missing. Despite the web of relationships social media provides us with, we are lonely.

On Sept. 2, Frank Bruni, a columnist for ///The New York Times///, addressed the epidemic of loneliness plaguing college campuses, and how the use of social media can be seen as a major cause.

“They’re lonely,” Bruni wrote of university students. “In a sea of people, they find themselves adrift. The technology that keeps them connected to parents and high school friends only reminds them of their physical separation from just about everyone they know best.”

Arts & Entertainment, Film and TV, Private

‘The Road Forward’ is an ever-vital call to attention on colonial injustices

by Jozéphine Crimp on

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On the night of Sept. 21, the Arts West Wing hosted a National Film Board screening reminding tearful students of the hardships that Canada’s indigenous population continues to face today. As part of its 7th annual Indigenous Awareness Week, McGill’s Indigenous Student Alliance (ISA) screened The Road Forward (2017), a documentary written and directed by Marie Clements. The film showcases the difficult journey that First Nations Peoples endure in order to survive in a settler colonial country. Through a powerful mix of both traditional and contemporary indigenous music and cinematography, the film explores salient, age-old questions with new forms of media and communication. As the credits roll, it is clear that The Road Forward succeeds at showing the audience just how much hurt still exists within this country we often admire.

The Road Forward captures viewers’ attention through the use of songs and powerful testimonials. This multimedia approach to documentary filmmaking, with contributions  from a variety of creators, enables often uneducated viewers to interact with indigenous issues in a new way.

The documentary focuses on an indigenous newspaper called The Native Voice, which has played an integral role in publishing and connecting indigenous voices across the country including influential union groups like the Native Brotherhood.

The Native Voice is one example of Indigenous peoples creating their own spaces to discuss issues of importance—the film itself acts as another. Clements, being Métis, likes to use the traditional concept of storytelling to communicate with the audience. She has made a variety of films and documentaries specializing in showing how indigenous music can heal and strengthen the indigenous community. In her previous work, she explored National Inquiry for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

One headline in The Native Voice reads: “1965: Indian Reserves Compared to Concentration Camps.” While purposefully uncomfortable viewing for a predominantly white audience, the film insists upon educating youth as a means of defeating the patterns of erasure pervading Canada’s history. Throughout the documentary, there are many powerful statements that make the audience think critically about abuse, exploitation, and reconciliation. The aforementioned headline was accompanied by two black-and-white photographs of an Indigenous reserve. Both photos revealed the reserves’ dire conditions, with the shocking reality that one of the pictures was taken in 2013. These pictures are what force audience members to have uncomfortable conversations—they’re meant to shock, but they’re also meant to promote a much-needed dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples.

A brief discussion with the ISA after the movie led to students asking how they can help. This question was hard to answer, but the ISA students said that education is an important start. For instance, it is surprising how many people do not know about Residential Schools and the 60s Scoop—the government-sanctioned kidnapping of thousands of indigenous children for adoption. Due to this ignorance, indigenous protesters today are fighting for the same rights that were demanded centuries before. The Road Forward may not tread much new ground in terms of subject matter, but its message is just as vital as it always has been.

 

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