MEDIA

Argos impressed with
York homebrew Jeff Johnson
John Avery says he's ready to play. The question is: Are the Argos ready to return him to the offensive backfield in view of backup Jeff Johnson's performance in the past two games? asked the Toronto Star Nov. 3. Johnson (BA '02), the homebrew out of York University, has been nothing short of amazing in the six quarters he's been the Argos' starting running back, replacing the injured Avery, a US import. Toronto native Johnson was named the CFL's offensive player of the week after rushing for 40 yards on six carries, picking up 157 yards on eight receptions and scoring a pair of TDs in the Oct. 27 win over Hamilton . He was set to be the starter when the Argos closed out the regular season Nov. 5 in Ottawa against the Renegades. Having clinched first place in the East the Argos won't play again until Nov. 20 when they host either Montreal or Saskatchewan in the division final. "I wouldn't have any animosity if J.J. is the man going into the playoffs," Avery said. "That's not a problem because he's playing well right now. He's in the groove.” The Vancouver Sun also noted that the former York running back has been “a late-season revelation” for the first-place Argos .

York economist profiled as an important public intellectual
Some intellectuals influence public policy on the margins; others influence outcomes. Charles McMillan belongs to the second category, said the National Post Nov. 3 in a profile of the York economist. The profile is part of the Post’s search to find Canada 's most important public intellectual. McMillan, a professor of international business at York ’s Schulich School of Business and author of The Japanese Industrial System, served as senior policy adviser to Brian Mulroney from 1983 to 1987, shaping the sweeping economic reform agenda of Canada 's last Conservative government. From privatization to free trade, there was no aspect of the Mulroney agenda that was not substantially influenced by Charley McMillan, wrote the profile's author, L. Ian MacDonald, editor of Policy Options and former chief speechwriter for Mulroney. In the beginning, during the 1983 leadership campaign, McMillan also served as Mulroney's pollster and principal speechwriter, running the content of the campaign out of his briefcase. "There is no doubt," Mulroney says today, "that Charley played a very important role, especially at the beginning."

Talks to avert a strike went late into the night
Students at York University are breathing a little easier at the news that the school's teaching assistants, graduate assistants and contract faculty have reached a tentative deal with management, said CBC News online Nov. 4. Other Toronto media also reported the tentative settlements reached with York University ’s CUPE 3903 Units 1, 2 and 3, which are due for ratification votes next week. A day earlier, The Globe and Mail said talks to avert a strike by the 2,400 assistants and contract faculty continued late into the night as students braced for disruptions to their class schedules. "We're really hoping it doesn't come to that. No one wants to go on strike," Alex Levant, a spokesman for CUPE Local 3903 and a contract faculty member, said before the deadline. A mediator appointed by the Ministry of Labour met with both sides in an effort to reach an agreement. The Toronto Star, CFTO-TV’s CTV News at 6, Global Ontario, A-Channel and City-tv also covered the negotiations.

York scores high in key Globe survey categories
York students gave their University a high B+ for the overall educational experience in The Globe and Mail's annual "University Report Card" published Nov. 2. Students surveyed for the listing were asked to give marks for teaching quality, class size, faculty availability and student interaction, among other things. Among large universities (more than 25,000 students), only the University of Western Ontario got a higher mark in the category, an A. York also got a B+  for overall satisfaction from its students and an A- for technology. The Globe repeatedly listed York among universities that had made key improvements since the survey was launched in 2002, including for technology on campus, labs/research equipment, sense of personal safety and security on campus, food services and, especially, school spirit.

The Globe based its report on a voluntary, online survey of more than 26,000 students at 37 Canadian universities in June. Approximately 1,480 York students completed the survey. Unlike Maclean’s annual Canadian university rankings, this report is based totally on undergraduate student feedback, the value of which, the Globe noted, is recognized by universities. For instance, York University uses the Report Card as one of the inputs to allocate resources. Rob Tiffin, York's vice-president students, told the newspaper: "The University Report Card was very helpful to us as it is perceived entirely from the student's point of view. By definition students are our largest audience so what they think matters. It has also been very useful in helping us understand how best we can target our resources to improve those areas of the student experience that are under our control."

Another feature in the package focused on new ways of teaching. Clickers. Blogs. Electronic office hours. Live on-line chats. With students demanding more for their high tuition fees, technology is starting to transform the classroom, especially the larger ones, as universities grapple with how to improve the overall educational experience of their students, said the story. Bob Gagne, chief information officer in computing and network services at York , said many professors are increasingly looking to technology to supplement what they're already doing in the classroom. "I don't for a second think it's a panacea. You can't say technology is a single answer to changing what the student is going to think about quality of teaching," Gagne said. "You can teach very badly with technology. It's not a solution. It may be part of the solution some of the time."

Like other schools, York is using clickers in its law school. About half the University's classrooms are e-classrooms, with computer and display technology built in. And a few professors are even capturing lectures on audio and posting it online later, Gagne said. "There is an increasing expectation from students to have more technology involved. It's one more tool to be able to do something a little more easily than you could before to engage students."

Canada – and York – are leading the way to Mars
The Canadian Space Agency's announcement at York of an additional $6 million for a York-led team to complete a weather station for NASA's next mission to Mars received national television coverage Oct. 27. Stories broadcast nationally on CBC and CTV news featured  York space scientists who are heading the Canadian team to develop weather-station instrumentation for the 2007 Phoenix mission, along with high-tech firms MDA and Optech. Both CBC and CTV also posted stories on their Web sites.

On CBC-TV’s "The National" host Peter Mansbridge said Canada is leading the way to Mars. The news item explained that lidar is a key technology on the station that will measure clouds and water vapour, beaming the data back to Earth. "The whole cycle of water through from ice to vapour and back again in the Martian atmosphere will tell us something about the history of water on Mars," said earth and space scientist Peter Taylor (right) of York ’s Faculty of Science & Engineering.

"There is water on Mars," said Allan Carswell (left) , a professor emeritus at York , who will lead the Canadian research on the Mars mission, reported CBC online. "Since water is necessary as far as we know for any forms of life then the hope is in some basic form there is enough water and Mars could have life." Professors Diane Michelangeli and Taylor will develop computer models of the planet's atmosphere for mission plans and operations. "Mars is known to have major dust storms," said Michelangeli in a release. "The more we learn the better our ability to reduce the risk of problems for any future manned mission to the planet."

CTV NewsNet highlighted comments by Taylor, who said a remarkable feature of the Mars landscape will be studied. Each spring a significant mass of water-ice sublimates from the polar cap, forming seasonal ice clouds. "Whenever you stand at a telescope you're looking at strange, new worlds," he told reporters. " Phoenix is going to be on one of those worlds." Taylor added that there are questions about where this water-ice ends up and how stable the current ice cap is. Observing these clouds and dust storm features with the Phoenix lidar, he said, will "provide an exciting new insight into hese aspects of the climate of Mars."

Conference looks at lack of loos
The scarcity of public washrooms comes as no news to women waiting in line for the paltry few toilets at the National Arts Centre, reported The Ottawa Citizen Nov. 1. But there's much more at stake, said Deborah Cowen, a postdoctoral fellow in geography at York 's Atkinson School of Social Sciences, in a story about a conference next March in Chicago addressing the lack of public washrooms. What are we doing for the homeless who need to wash or brush their teeth? Or for gay and transgendered people? Cowen and a good many others say we're facing a raft of washroom problems. One big part of it is "public" washrooms are becoming increasingly private property. "You can buy something at Starbucks and use the washroom," said Cowen. "Or you can still use Starbucks and not buy anything, but you have to look like you could buy something." Yes, Cowen allows, it is a subject that makes people giggle. Washroom access has always been a problem, she concluded. "It's not like there was a golden age of great public washrooms and we declined since then. But there's certainly been a shift from some sort of notion of public space and access to it."

Muslim families celebrate end of Ramadan
Toronto Muslims celebrated the end of a month of sacrifice during the holy month of Ramadan Wednesday, reported The Toronto Sun Nov. 3. "It's a celebration after a certain period of hardship," Amila Buturovic, a professor of Islamic studies in York ’s Faculty of Arts, said of the Eid al-Fitr holiday. "Other than just the regular prayers, it involves families getting together."

Juggling books and a newborn
"Motherhood may come naturally, but not everyone's a natural mother," York undergraduate student Erin Hawkins wrote in an Oct. 28 column in the Toronto Star. After more than 10 years of marriage, "my husband Ken and I finally came around to the idea that it might be time to turn coupledom into a proper family," she wrote. "Ken's job as a full-time bookkeeper meant financial stability, but I was in the middle of changing careers from freelance music journalist/retail everywoman to teacher. I had two years left as an undergraduate at York University and still had to go to teacher's college after that. This would mean one school year pregnant, another juggling books and newborn baby, and a year at teacher's college with a one-year-old adjusting to daycare. In my mind I could see an endless stream of assignments, bills and guilt piling up." A photo featured Hawkins reading to her son Duncan Alexander MacInnes in between classes at York .

Canada leads world with high-speed Internet, study finds
Canada is leading the world in high-speed Internet connectivity, according to a benchmark study released by the Canadian Internet Project, reported CanWest News Service in a story published Nov. 3 in the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and The Vancouver Sun. "We are now seeing the Internet integrated into the lives of a majority of Canadians and that is changing the way we operate, both in our work lives and in our personal lives," said Fred Fletcher, director of York University's Graduate Program in Communication and Culture, who co-authored the report Canada Online! with Charles Zamaria of Ryerson University and Andre Caron of the Université de Montreal. "It is fairly revolutionary and we need to understand these changes." He said Canadians tend to use the Internet the most at home and at their workplace, compared with developing countries where the highest use is in cyber cafes and public libraries.

Marketing Daily also featured a story about the study ("Surfers love the web, but won’t give up TV") Nov. 3. Canadians who go online are still avid consumers of traditional media such as newspapers and television, according to a new study of how Canadians use and view the Internet, reported the online version of Marketing Magazine. For instance, 59 per cent of Internet users said newspapers are an important source of information, versus 50 per cent of non-users. Other traditional media, such as books, magazines and radio were also deemed more important by Internet users. Only television was more important to non-users, 60 per cent of whom cited it as an important source of information versus 54 per cent of those online.

Even the road less travelled can be harmful to your health
New research at York comes to the startling conclusion that driving in light traffic can be more stressful than driving in heavy traffic because it leaves one's mind freer to obsess about work, reported The Globe and Mail Oct. 29 in a story about commuter stress. Until recently, little attention has been paid to how work stress affects driver stress and vice-versa, says Christine Wickens, a PhD psychology student who worked on the York research project. Wickens tracked 42 commuters from a range of occupations – "everything from funeral directors to computer staffers to City of Toronto workers" – as they travelled on Ontario 's Highway 401. By interviewing them by cellphone at strategic heavy-traffic and light-traffic locations on their routes, Wickens found that in moderately congested traffic, "where highways are crowded but vehicles are travelling at 60 kilometres per hour, motorists must focus all their attention on their driving." As a result, she says, they can't dwell on workplace issues. "In effect, good driving conditions give you the mental room to fume over any job-related problems that were happening right before you got into your car," said psychology Professor David Wiesenthal (left), co-author of the York study, which was recently published in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Research.

What SARS can teach us about bird flu
York environmental studies professors Roger Keil and S. Harris Ali wrote an opinion piece for the The Globe and Mail Web site Nov. 2 detailing insights from their research on the SARS crisis, as applied to fears of an avian flu pandemic. Among them, they said, was that "there is no place on Earth where safety from emerging infectious disease can be assumed." They concluded by noting that the ravages of HIV/AIDS and malaria in Africa are far greater than SARS or bird flu, and of proportions yet unknown in Asia, Europe and the Americas: "Yet think again: when H5N1 mutates into a virus that can be transmitted among humans, there seems to be no barrier for it to have exactly the same ravaging effects as those other pathogens - in combination with poverty. Africa probably will be the continent where the avian flu will find most of its first victims. The disease will be everywhere, but the suffering and dying will be a function of poverty, urbanization, injustice, lack of health care, and underdevelopment. As we know from the sad experience of tainted water on our native reserves, these conditions are not far from our doorstep." 

Accountants woo Gen Y: Business school grads offered parties, packages, perks
Although several months will pass before Sonia Gandhi receives her KPMG Valentine's Day gift package, the Schulich School of Business senior is not shy about sharing with classmates her good feelings about her future employer. As one of the accounting giant's 93 "campus ambassadors," Gandhi left a summer job with KPMG for her final year of classes, armed with branded knapsacks, coffee mugs, Post-it notes and other giveaways, recruiting information and pre-loaded coffee cards with which to entertain prospective student recruits. She was part of a team that selected a topic dear to her employer's heart in a competition last summer, "Recruiting and retaining Generation Y," which put her in the spotlight for becoming an ambassador.

With demand for accounting graduates at an all-time high due to stringent corporate governance requirements in the wake of the US-imposed Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and Canada 's copycat reforms, accounting firms and other large employers are waging highly competitive campaigns to recruit the best and brightest.

The 21-year-old Gandhi, who begins a full-time position at KPMG's Toronto office in September, 2006, says she is proud to act as KPMG's "eyes and ears" on campus, although she won't be paid for it. She will also gather competitors' recruiting material and mail it to her employer in pre-paid envelopes. "[Students] know they are in hot demand," Gandhi says. "Just to get into the Schulich School of Business, you need a 90 per cent average." However, it is hard for many students to gather unbiased information from professional recruiters, she says, adding that as a peer, she is more approachable. "All of the firms are very nice to you, but some students are very uncomfortable asking questions of recruiters," she says. "It's a two-way street. You have to let the students get to know you."

Career journey starts with assessment
"Only a few weeks into my first term of the MBA program and I was supposed to take a lengthy career assessment test, write a reflection essay based on the tests results and then plan out a career ‘journey map’ for the next two years," wrote Richard Bloom, a former "Report on Business" reporter, about his experiences as a student at York’s Schulich School of Business, in The Globe and Mail Oct. 28. "It was a frustrating assignment, I thought, because I'm in a different position than so many of my business-school peers. Many are in the program to change careers, but they don't know what job or industry they would like to work in," wrote Bloom. "I know what I want, a career in media management, and how I plan to get there, I thought. Wrong. As I began to ponder the results of my career assessment test and map out what the next two years would look like, I began to realize this would be more useful than I had given it credit for."

Tax expert cool to charging GST on food
The Agricultural Institute of Canada, which wants to help Canadian farmers, says the federal goods and services tax should be charged on groceries, reported the Toronto Star Nov. 1. Tax experts, however, were cool to the proposal. Resistance to charging GST on food has always been strong and it would be difficult for any government in Canada to support it, said Neil Brooks, tax law and policy professor at York's Osgoode Hall Law School. When the then-Conservative government mentioned in 1987 that it was considering a comprehensive tax on all goods, Brooks said, opposition to charging GST on groceries forced Ottawa to narrow the scope of the tax. A low-income earner spends between 30 and 35 per cent of income on food, while a wealthy person might spend between five or six per cent – and the tax increases that disparity, Brooks said.

Campbell's bestseller began as letters to self
Maria Campbell 's emergence as one of the great aboriginal writers of our time began during a difficult time of stress, reported The StarPhoenix in Saskatoon Nov. 1. "I was doing volunteer work at a crisis centre in Edmonton, working with women and children in crisis," said Campbell, who received a York honorary degree in 1992. "I met an elderly Quaker woman who understood the stress and pain I was facing. She suggested to me that, if for some reason, I couldn't talk to anyone about work or how I was feeling, then I should write myself a letter. I did that and several years later, the letters became my first book." Halfbreed turned into a Canadian best seller and Campbell 's knack for storytelling has turned into more books, plays, documentary films, videos, and a career as an educator.

Cyber ghosts and e-mail from the dead
"Any technology throughout history has been adapted to two things – first of all pornography, and secondly, the paranormal," says James Alcock, a professor at York’s Glendon College.who specializes in the psychology of belief, reported The Globe and Mail Oct. 31 in a story about a man who believes his dead wife sends him e-mails. Alcock is a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a group that has investigated and exposed psychics, spoon benders, alien abductees and poltergeists since it was formed in the mid-1970s.

Horror writer dresses up as werewolf
On Halloween Edo van Belkom was "going to put on a werewolf costume and hopefully scare some of the kids when they come to my door," reported The Toronto Sun Oct. 31. Scaring people is something van Belkom is very good at. The 1991 York creative writing grad has written 25 books and has had more than 200 shorts stories published since he started writing horror, science fiction, fantasy and mystery stories 16 years ago. Van Belkom has won three Aurora Awards from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, one Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writer's Association and has been nominated for three Arthur Ellis Awards from the Crime Writers of Canada Association. And his book Wolf Pack has recently been nominated for the Silver Birch Award from the Ontario Library Association.