Given an email with a questionable source and a set of potential authors, the researchers’ method analyzes frequent patterns in the suspects’ previous writing to determine the email’s author with 80 to 90 per cent confidence. This frequent pattern analysis is distinct from other computerized authorship attribution in that it boasts high accuracy but is still easy to explain to a courtroom. “With our approach, we are not a black box,” said Benjamin Fung, professor and data-mining expert at the CIISE, in an interview with The Daily “We can explain how we derived conclusions.”

The analysis method, a collaborative effort between Fung, Concordia cyber forensics expert Mourad Debbabi, and PhD student Farkhund Iqbal, mines an author’s past emails for bundles of features to determine their personal write-print. The unique features of a particular write-print range from the richness of the author’s vocabulary, to the presence and structure of their salutations. The program can then compare a set of suspects’ write-prints to the email in question and determine who is most likely to have authored it.

Fung freely admitted that there are ways around one’s own write-print, especially because the program can show exactly which stylistic techniques compose a given write-print. However, much like trying to disguise one’s handwriting, it would be difficult to resist falling back into familiar patterns, especially since the program looks for hundreds of bundles of attributes.

Additionally, some attributes are tough to disguise. “For example, vocabulary richness is very difficult to fake,” Fung said. “It’s very difficult for me to suddenly increase my vocabulary.”

Fung and his colleagues developed the method with law enforcement applications in mind. Since most successful authorship-attribution techniques are tailored toward literary plagiarism, the researchers had to develop a method that could glean a write-print from smaller and less formal emails.

Even in combing past emails to determine a write-print, Fung and Debbabi recognize that the method should protect the suspect’s privacy. Much of Fung’s past work focuses on balancing the valuable conclusions that data mining can draw with the individual privacy issues it may raise. “One research direction that we want to work on is how to…perform write-print analysis without compromising privacy.”

With social trends moving toward “micro-communicating” via tweets, comments, and text messages, Fung is not sure how much farther authorship attribution can be ported.

“Whenever we port [the techniques] from one style of writing to another style – like traditional writing to email – we need to add stylometric features to capture the new writing styles,” Fung said. “[With] shorter messages, like SMS or Twitter…it’s definitely a challenge. Maybe there’s no solution.”

The team’s authorship attribution techniques for email, however, proved highly accurate when tested on the Enron database, which contained over 200,000 real emails authored by 158 different employees. Following the program’s success, the CIISE began to field calls from around the world asking for help tracing anonymous emails.

“Some private investigators [call with] real cases, some of the investigators just want to test the cases they have already solved,” Fung said.
Victims of email harassment also contacted Fung for help. “I received many emails from many different people from different countries, saying, ‘Somebody is sending me a threatening email, would you please help me to solve this?’” Fung said. “They just read the newspaper title and send me an email.”

So far, there has been no concrete collaboration between the team and law enforcement or private individuals. The team is currently focusing on applying their methods in a second scenario: using an email to infer certain characteristics about the author – such as nationality or education – even when there aren’t any suspects.

Fung stressed that this procedure would be significantly less accurate, though “it would be useful for the early stages of investigation,” he said, “where the investigator has very little clues.”

The post Unmasking e-criminals appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Where some see only the purse-tightening aftershocks of the economic recession, people like Rachel Botsman and Lauren Anderson see the first casualties of a dramatic shift in consumption habits. The decades-old model of wasteful hyper-consumption is quickly ceding ground to a cleaner, sharing and swapping-based model called Collaborative Consumption. Botsman and Anderson are part of a movement that has researched and mapped out the phenomenon, most recently in the 2010 book What’s Mine Is Yours, which Botsman co-authored.

“Collaborative Consumption puts a system in place where people can share resources without forfeiting cherished personal freedoms or sacrificing their lifestyle,” Botsman wrote in the introduction to What’s Mine Is Yours.
The Collaborative Consumption model re-imagines traditional industry by creating services that work to efficiently re-allocate existing resources (like used textbooks and idle guest rooms) rather than churning out new ones. The most successful examples, like Netflix and Bixi, create secondary markets for used or shared possessions without the poor-quality stigma that typically accompanies communal or secondhand resources, like public restrooms and Salvation Army clothing.

Renting happiness

Collaborative Consumption is rooted in the principle of separating product benefits from product purchase or ownership. A bike you pick up at a Bixi station will serve the same purpose as a bike that spends most of its day in your garage or a campus bike rack. A secondhand textbook will contain the same information as the shrink-wrapped one that costs three times more at the bookstore. Food eaten on a communal Plate Club dish will not taste any different from food in the SSMU cafeteria’s single-use Styrofoam. In all cases of Collaborative Consumption, consumers can save money without forfeiting any product benefits or attributes – all they sacrifice is individual ownership.

The environmental benefits of lower purchase demand are easily implied. Anderson, innovation strategist at Collaborative Consumption Lab – an agency that advises businesses on how to  implement Cllaborative Consumption strategies – said a key facet of Collaborative Consumption systems is “cradle-to-cradle” design, in which reuse replaces disposal.
“The concept that there is no ‘away’ grows more and more apparent every day,” Anderson wrote in an email from Sydney, Australia. “We are exceeding the planet’s capacity to deal with this waste.”

What sets Collaborative Consumption apart from other environmental movements is that it does not require us to use or enjoy less – just to actually own less. In many cases, in fact, Collaborative Consumption systems allow users to enjoy more than traditional consumption would permit. “Can’t buy happiness? Rent it!” urges Avelle, an online accessory rental service that lets users borrow Chanel totes and Louis Vuitton purses.

Zipcar, an hourly-or-daily-rate car sharing network now operating in over fifty major cities across the globe, prides itself not only on the quality and ubiquity of its vehicles, but on the fact that owners can drive a different car every day if they choose and never incur the costs of owning or insuring the vehicle. Under Collaborative Consumption, if it can be bought new, it can probably be rented at the same quality, with the same benefits, at a much lower cost.

“It is clear that for every current traditional market, there is an opportunity for a Collaborative Consumption-based alternative,” Anderson wrote.

By providing benefits without ownership, Collaborative Consumption networks make it possible for anyone to wear diamond earrings without maxing out their credit cards, Bixi along the Lachine Canal without ever having to buy a bike lock or – like Marie Thomas, U3 Physics at McGill – spend ten days in New York City without dropping a dime on lodging.

Communities, not customers

When Marie Thomas travels, rather than bargain-hunt on hotel websites, she consults the CouchSurfing network. Couch Surfers have instant, rent-free access to each other’s thousands of futons, spare beds, and sleeping bags around the world. The reference-based system is built on mutual trust and credibility, which members can earn by being excellent guests, hosts, or both. For well-referenced Couch Surfers like Marie, the travel possibilities are limitless – free lodging awaits her in Panama, Belarus, and Thailand.

“[People I tell] say they would love to do it, but they kind of have this reaction like, ‘is it safe?’” Thomas said. “And I’m always like, absolutely.”

CouchSurfing embodies the driving principle of Collaborative Consumption – idle capacity. Many of us have a couch, sink, and toilet that simply aren’t in use 24 hours a day. When systems like CouchSurfing make this idle space available to travellers like Thomas, they distribute resources more evenly without creating demand for an additional hotel room.
For many users, however, the focus is not on environmentally-friendly resource allocation, but on the close-knit communities these systems forge. Both Thomas and Anderson praised the personal connections inherent in an exchange based on sharing rather than purchase.

“The sense of community that is present in all Collaborative Consumption exchanges is truly remarkable,” Anderson wrote.
Thomas, who during her ten days in Brooklyn ate, lived, and partied with nearly a dozen other Couch Surfers from countries as far-flung as Syria, agrees that the friendships she’s made are the highlights of her CouchSurfing career. “I feel like I have a family [in Brooklyn] now,” Thomas said. “I had that good a time.”

Thomas added that as a host, she tends to reject the occasional Couch Surfing request if the only personalized aspect of their message is her name. The point of this system, she stressed, is not to give freeloaders a cheap night’s stay.
“For the sake of the culture and community, you should make an attempt to be interested in your host,” Thomas said. “How are you going to connect with someone who is just using you as a hostel?”

Trust between strangers

While services like Bixi and CouchSurfing are flourishing on the principles of Collaborative Consumption, it has yet to become a prevalent blueprint for designing systems that prioritize allocating resources over creating new ones.
Anderson believes that one of the biggest hurdles will be building trust between strangers – a key driving force of Collaborative Consumption systems. “[Trust between strangers] is the most important ingredient to get right,” Anderson wrote. “Without this as a stable building block, it is very difficult to achieve the right level of critical mass.”

Anderson pointed out that the most successful systems have built-in mechanisms for effectively establishing that trust, such as CouchSurfing’s reference system and eBay’s buyer feedback process. “Through building this trust, these systems scaled rapidly to support a critical mass of users who all have an inherent belief in the value and success of the system.”

Moving forward fast

Even when systems get all of the ingredients right, Collaborative Consumption is not likely to supplant traditional consumption. Ideally, the two would exist side-by-side, and most consumers of the future would have one foot in both camps.
“While it may continue to be necessary to buy certain things ‘new,’” Anderson said, “Collaborative Consumption has the potential to be an equal counterpart to other more traditional forms of consumption.”

Anderson added that businesses that stick doggedly to the practices of wasteful consumption are likely to go the way of Blockbuster and Borders.

“Some industries might be slower than others in recognizing the importance of a Collaborative Consumption model,” Anderson conceded. “[But] those who don’t catch up will certainly be left behind the newcomers.”

The post The future of (un)consumption appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Mini Courses – semester-long, publicly available evening classes in subjects as diverse as Japanese language, sketch, and Caribbean cooking – more than doubled its profits in the 2009-2010 school year and continues to generate strong profits in 2011. The courses have also drawn the attention of organizations outside McGill, including businesses wishing to subsidize Arabic language or public speaking training for their employees.

Mini Courses Supervisor Nell Slochowski, who took charge in the fall 2009, has overseen an ongoing Mini Courses overhaul that has included implementation of online registration, reassessment of course profitability, and greater variety in Mini Courses’ offerings.

“We’ve gone out [and] found new teachers for unique courses, changed prices around, and improved the website significantly,” Slochowski said of the improvements.

Slochowski also credits the increased interest in Mini Courses to the program’s higher focus on customer satisfaction. The Mini Courses team audits courses and solicits student feedback throughout the entire semester.

“We are on top of our teachers and we keep notes on everything,” Slochowski said. “There’s a lot of commitment to making Mini Courses better.”

Mini Courses sources both professional and student teachers in an effort to balance profitability, student involvement, and course quality. Slochowski has also sought to integrate Mini Courses with other McGill clubs, both to find knowledgeable teachers and to potentially provide the clubs themselves with a new revenue stream.

Surbhi Gupta, a U2 Engineering student who taught Indian cooking during the Fall 2010 semester, found the teaching process daunting at first but ultimately rewarding.

“I’ve never taught such a huge group, so it was a little bit of a challenge,” Gupta said. “[But] I thought it would be a good idea to expose students to all of the varieties of Indian food…and it was a very good experience.”

The Mini Courses team’s methodology has been accompanied by dramatic profit increases. Mini Courses revenue represented 18.7 per cent of SSMU’s Building operations revenue during the 2010 school year, up from 10.2 per cent the previous year. In March of last year, former SSMU VP Finance and Operations Jose Diaz cited Mini Courses’ profitability as a key factor in the balancing of SSMU’s budget.

Although some of the improvements have resulted in operational snarls – including traffic-based stalls in the online registration and the cancellation of courses with low registration, such as LSAT Practice and Ukrainian for beginners – Mini Courses saw almost as much profit this fall as the 2009 school year’s fall and winter semesters combined. Slochowski stressed, however, that even as profitability climbs, the focus remains on student satisfaction.

“It would be easy to let profit be the driving force behind all we do,” said Slochowski. “[But] I think we’ve really kept a sense of ‘customer comes first.’”

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The ASA became the seventh society to join the existing family of six independent departmental societies (including Chemical, Civil, and Mechanical Engineering) represented by the EUS’s Memorandum of Agreement with the McGill administration.

These departmental associations possess council privileges that include voting rights and representative seats on the EUS but also retain their individual structures and autonomy.

“Architecture is already part of the Faculty of Engineering, so this move makes a lot of sense,” EUS President Daniel Keresteci told the council. “We’ve worked a lot with the ASA in the past and we’d like to continue and improve that relationship.”

The motion was the formalization of a referendum passed during last week’s elections period, in which a majority of Architecture students voted in favour of the ASA joining the EUS. Of 170 Architecture students, 110 participated in the vote.

The motion was passed at EUS Council with no opposition or abstentions, although Keresteci took a moment to briefly clarify that this change would not affect student fees in either faculty. Josh Redel, EUS VP Communications, also reassured those present that ASA would retain the same rights and privileges as any other EUS departmental society, including U0 to U4 representative seats.

Joining the EUS grants the ASA a more formalized standing with the McGill administration via the EUS’s Memorandum of Agreement (MoA), a contract between the society and the University administration. ASA President Kyle Burrows stressed that this formal recognition was the main benefit of allying with the EUS, as MoAs are rarely granted to sub-faculty groups.

“[McGill’s administration] doesn’t recognize student groups below the faculty level,” Burrows said. “Lacking formal recognition with the school…has always limited what we can do.”

Meredith Toivanen, the ASA’s VP Communications, agreed that the move would improve the ASA’s standing and leverage with the McGill administration.

“It gives us a sense of legitimacy in the eyes of McGill,” Toivanen said.

Toivanen added that while the administration’s decision to close the Architecture Café this past summer pushed this issue forward, the alliance was intended to protect the ASA in the future and not to address past grievances.

“Essentially, the Architecture Café as an issue for the ASA has passed,” Toivanen said. “The EUS won’t be able to provide any assistance for what has happened in the past. However, if anything comes up in the future, as members of the EUS, we’ll be in better standing.”

In defending the motion from the EUS side, Keresteci said that bringing like-minded students closer together and representing a wider swath of the student population would benefit the EUS. Keresteci added that although the ASA is a latecomer to the EUS relative to the other six sub-faculty groups, the EUS constitution is designed to allow the inclusion of new departmental societies.

“This is definitely something that [the EUS] has sort of planned for,” Keresteci said. “The right pieces just needed to fall into place.”

The post Architecture students join EUS appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The creative arts therapies – art therapy, music therapy, drama therapy, and dance movement therapy – are a set of unique therapeutic practices that incorporate creative processes to potentially provide a clearer image than simple dialogue of a patient’s inner psychological and emotional state. These practices are not simply adjuncts, but require training and specialization.

Jen Marchand is a research assistant currently completing her master’s degree in Concordia’s art therapy program, one of the very few creative arts therapy programs in the country. She pointed out that the classic verbal therapeutic model may hit a wall with patients experienced in maintaining verbal defense mechanisms.

“They know how to ‘talk the talk,’” Marchand said. “Art therapy…opens up a completely different side of who they are.”

Josée Leclerc, practicing art therapist and director of Concordia’s graduate art therapy program, explained that art therapy has three components: the art therapist, the patient, and the image, with “many levels of communication” between all three elements.

Art therapy begins with the process of creation, which can be as simple as a client using artistic materials to “draw” how they feel today. During the subsequent reception process, both therapist and patient examine the patient’s image.

Leclerc stressed that this is not a clear-cut interpretative process and there is no “dictionary of symbols” in her desk drawer. Rather, in each client’s reflection process, unique insights emerge for both patient and therapist. “Unconscious material…that [the client] is not too aware of may manifest in the image,” Leclerc said. As the two reflect on the image, more often than not, “the image reflects back.”

Sandi Curtis, director of Concordia’s music therapy program, described a similar emphasis on creation in the music therapy process. While many associate music therapy with guided listening or “those ‘buy this CD and you’ll stop smoking’ [products],” Curtis said that actual music-making does the lion’s share of the work. This can be a challenge for the therapist, who must also be a skilled enough musician to make musical creation accessible to clients who may have no musical training. developmental or brain-related disabilities, or a combination thereof.

“While a music teacher could say, stay with me for twenty years and I’ll take you somewhere,” Curtis said, “a music therapist, that day, in that moment, that half hour, is going to connect with someone.”

Arts therapies can provide a tangible timeline of client progress by leaving a (sometimes literal) paper trail of a client’s creative output. The process can also circumvent language barriers, a powerful benefit in multilingual communities like Quebec.

Having a patient channel their emotions through images or song can obviously be very effective for patients with impaired verbal skills, such as those on the wide spectrum of autism. However, both Leclerc and Curtis stressed that art therapy is for people of all ages and in all walks of life.

“It’s not necessarily only the treatment of choice when verbal expression is lacking,” Leclerc said. “It can really be for any population…we have art therapists working in geriatry, in children’s hospitals, schools, community centres, rehab centres, and women’s shelters.”

“With any patient, it is a great tool to try to understand the specificity of the individual…and how I can best help them,” she continued.

Curtis agreed, citing businesses who have begun hiring music therapists for their wellness centres to help employees deal with time and stress management and quality of life issues.

“I’ve never met a person who hasn’t been affected, or made some connection, by music,” Curtis said.

Recent legislation, however, casts an uncertain light on the future of arts therapists. One of the functions of Bill 21, passed unanimously by Quebec’s National Assembly in June 2009 but still in the pre-implementation stage, is to reserve the practice of psychotherapy to qualified members of professional orders, which at present do not include arts therapy.

In many ways this is a beneficial move. Marchand lauded Bill 21 for preventing unqualified “nail polish psychotherapists” from adopting the title. Leclerc agreed that stricter regulations of the credentials and experience required of titular psychotherapists will ultimately protect potential clients.

Whether or not the bill extends the mantle of “psychotherapist” to arts therapists, however, remains to be seen. Although creative art therapists must currently meet the standards of Quebec’s Association des art-thérapeutes du Québec (AATQ), the group is not considered professional in terms of governmental regulation. Benefits of membership in a professional order (such as the Order of Psychologists) include high standards of practice and, thanks to membership fees, a stronger support network in place to legally and professionally protect both therapists and patients. Leclerc also added that many insurance plans (with good cause) are more likely to reimburse patient visits to recognized professionals.

Leclerc and Curtis are optimistic regarding a best-case outcome in which their programs’ graduates are recognized as order-qualified psychotherapists, based on the rigorous standards of Concordia’s Creative Arts Therapies department. Marchand will graduate with at least 800 hours of practical experience under her belt and students in the music therapy program must complete 1,200 hours of clinical practice under supervision. Between practical hours and the sixty-credit master’s degree course load, graduates emerge from their studies extremely well-equipped for practice, without having had to hunt for experience.

Even as the fate of arts psychotherapy hangs in the balance, Leclerc said the field is growing “incredibly” in Quebec, with a strong influx of applicants despite the programs’ stringent prerequisites. With the recent reorganization of Quebec’s mental health care system and the increased proportion of late-age afflictions such as strokes and Alzheimer’s disease (an unfortunate side effect of Canada’s greying population) the need for arts therapists has never been greater. Leclerc admitted that while graduates may need to “be creative” in finding jobs, there is no dearth of opportunities for an arts therapist.

Growth of the practice aside, Curtis also emphasized that the diversity of potential uses for arts therapy make the professions virtually impervious to hiring slumps. During a lull in the educational sector, for instance, arts therapies can easily migrate to the healthcare or employee-wellness sectors.

Curtis worried that low awareness of the opportunities available to arts therapists may lead artistically talented students to decide early on between their art and their careers. In arts therapy, students could be delighted – as Leclerc and Curtis were – to discover that they can synthesize their artistic talents with a practical and versatile career path.

“I think that for a lot of the population the psychiatric model has its limits,” Leclerc said. “The idea of engaging the so-called healthy, creative side of the mind…I think that the population in general really sees the advantages of that.”

The post Art of the matter appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Cyber-hysteria ensued as the news spread, garnering headlines like “Icky! Toronto Film Festival Infest [sic] With The Creepy-Crawlies!” on widely read gossip site perezhilton.com, even as the festival’s organizers struggled to put a lid on what was, in fact, a false alarm. The hours of needless frenzy were indicative of a much larger issue – a bedbug panic that has gripped North America following a summer of resurgence for the nocturnal bloodsuckers, who have found their way into retail stores, libraries, and even a Times Square movie theatre.

“It’s a bit surprising,” wrote Stephanie Boucher, curator of the Lyman Entomological Museum at Macdonald Campus, in an email to the daily. “The bedbug situation … was almost completely eradicated for the past 50 years and is now making an impressive comeback.”

The resurgence has been tentatively attributed to the pests’ evolved resistance to insecticides. A 2007 University of Kentucky study found a “widespread” resistance among bedbugs to common commercial insecticides – which likely developed during their near half-century of inactivity – and the authors added ominously that “without development of new tactics for bedbug management, further escalation of this public health problem should be expected.”

Increased international travel may also be helping bedbugs spread. A 2008 Danish study noted that from 2003 to 2007 bedbug inquiries in Europe were most frequent between July and November, and then spiked again in January (following Christmas holiday travel). Bedbugs “hitchhike” easily on travellers, and their clothing, and a 2010 National Pest Management Association (NPMA) survey of exterminators concluded that once they settle into a domain, the bloodsuckers are “THE most difficult pest to treat.”

“It takes only a pregnant female hiding in your [suitcase] and brought back to your apartment to start an infestation,” Boucher wrote. Once inside, “the population builds up very rapidly.”

Despite the fact that bedbugs are very unlikely to transmit disease, they tend to leave painful bites on their sleeping victims and the NPMA survey warned that “the emotional and mental toll of experiencing a bed bug infestation can be severe.”

“It was a horrible experience,” said Greg (not his real name), a U3 chemistry student who discovered bedbugs in the previous tenants’ furniture a week after moving into his new Plateau apartment. Greg’s apartment was fumigated twice to no avail, and he eventually began sleeping in a turtleneck to avoid bites on his neck. “They’re like little ninja bugs,” he added. “You can never find all of them.”

The bedbugs’ spread can be worsened by residents’ reluctance to discuss or report them early on. Montreal Public Health’s most recent bedbug publication reassures tenants off the bat – “any house, apartment, or building can be a haven for bedbugs. No need to be embarrassed if these bugs end up moving in with you.” 
“People are sometimes ashamed to have insect problems in their house,” Boucher wrote, “but bedbug infestation has nothing to do with unsanitary conditions.”

The scarcity of comprehensive research on bedbug proliferation has only compounded the issue, and the situation is so worrisome that Ontario MPP Michael Colle is organizing a “bedbug summit” on September 29 at the Ontario legislature, that he hopes will draw federal attention and resources to the issue. “There’s no data or hard scientific facts about the proliferation,” Colle told CTV Toronto, citing the bedbug scare at the Toronto festival. “[The federal government] has got to be involved in getting a national health strategy to deal with this thing.”

Boucher agreed that increased public focus will only help the situation by urging increased awareness and research. “I think it is a good thing that the media are talking about it,” Boucher wrote. “There are people working on improved detection techniques and better control methods…so I am thinking that [hopefully] the problem should not become that much worse.”

The post Bloodsucking bedfellows appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Nicell described the master plan – which was designed in 2001 – as the University’s long-term development strategy to “accommodate a carefully directed growth in enrolment.”

He emphasized the project’s flexibility throughout the presentation, stressing the need to keep the plan adaptable in order to address the interests of the McGill community.

“[The master plan] isn’t as simple as, ‘Here’s the plan; here’s where we’re doing for the next 30 years,’” Nicell said. “It must be flexible to the McGill community’s changing needs, priorities, and opportunities.”

He also stressed that the objective of long-term sustainability underlies every part of the implementation plan.

Nicell spent the bulk of the presentation detailing over a dozen of the plan’s impending projects, including renovations of Stewart Bio, the Bronfman Building, the Lyman Duff Building, the Otto Maass chemistry labs, and the mechanical engineering undergrad teaching lab.  He also discussed the University’s plans to build a bioengineering facility on the northwest corner of McTavish and Docteur Penfield, as well as to eliminate parking spaces on lower campus by May.

Daniel Herscovitch, U3 Civil Engineering, said that the plan seemed to represent the McGill community’s best interests. He was the most excited about the plan to make McTavish Street more of a student-exclusive domain.“I think [this] is the best project, especially for students,” Herscovitch said.

U3 Civil Engineering student Owen McGaughey, a member of the environmentalist civil engineering group Pre-Serve, said that the energy reduction clauses of the implementation plan were a step in the right direction.

“I think most staff and students are interested in seeing a more modern campus that…treads more lightly on the earth, and I think the master plan suits those desires well,” McGaughey said.

McGaughey added that he would be downloading the new master plan to look over it more closely and encouraged other students to do the same. 
The McGill University master plan can be downloaded by signing into mcgill.ca/masterplan/documentation.

The post Nicell outlines University master plan appeared first on The McGill Daily.

To depoliticize the book’s motives entirely would be a disservice to Wiss, who unapologetically admits to being a “hopeless idealist” in FOB Doc’s first entry and consistently describes the Afghanistan mission as a just cause. Few entries pass in which Wiss does not praise the war as a noble effort by the Canadian government to liberate the Afghani people from the menace of the Taliban.

However, what holds the reader is not Wiss’s staunch support of the mission or his contempt for the Taliban, but his honest portrayal of life on the base. It is his wry accounts of wayward rocket-propelled grenades, the inconveniences of bathrooms riddled by shrapnel hits, and the mine sweeper whose bumper sticker reads “Do all jobs SUCK…or just mine?” It’s the abject fear and longing for home during late night bombings or treacherous journeys through Taliban territory. But most significantly, it is Wiss’s compassion for all of the patients he treats on his tour, be they Canadian soldiers, Afghani citizens, or Taliban prisoners of war. Wiss’s unflagging honesty makes FOB Doc an enthralling take on the Afghani conflict for supporters and detractors alike.

Even the least military-savvy reader will find FOB Doc an easy read. While “accessibility” has become a disparaging term in serious art circles, ease of comprehension is undoubtedly one of FOB Doc’s primary strengths. Although Wiss prefaces the book with a glossary, his years of experience writing medical articles render it unnecessary. Wiss’s ability to describe complicated medical procedures in layman’s terms translates well to the genre of military nonfiction, and is evident on every page. Readers who have never seen Black Hawk Down or picked up a Call of Duty controller will walk away from FOB Doc able to confidently discuss frag vests, IEDs, and a veritable lexicon of other military terms.

FOB Doc also pays constant respect to the underrated beauty of Afghanistan itself. The book itself is gorgeous, featuring colour photographs of dusky Afghani terrain that contrasts starkly with the military vehicles in the forefront. Wiss himself jovially samples passages from Lonely Planet’s guide to Afghanistan and continuously conveys his deep reverence for the Afghani countryside and the people who inhabit it.

But where the conflict’s politics enter into Wiss’s account, they do so uncompromisingly, risking the loss of readers who hold certain political inclinations. Former Chief of Defence Staff General Rick Hillier’s foreword, while lending a certain legitimacy to Wiss’s account, reads a little too much like a pro-war pamphlet, and gives a more militant support of the conflict than the rest of the book intends. Wiss’s own opinions, meanwhile – though frequent and firm – form a crucial component of his character and are more lovable in their honest morality than they are offensive in their political content. To strip the book of all its politics would leave an incomplete portrait of Captain Ray Wiss, MD.

To describe FOB Doc as “fun” might seem somewhat disrespectful, but Wiss’s character and the clarity of his prose heighten what could have been a sordid account into a thoroughly compelling read. Wiss has composed a gripping book that manages not only to familiarize the reader with the Afghanistan conflict’s grittiest details, but also to enthrall audiences of any political bent.

The post Soldier and surgeon appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Canwest Global, Canada’s largest media conglomerate, successfully filed for bankruptcy protection in a Toronto court on October 6.

The company – whose holdings include Global Television, the National Post, the Financial Post, and the Montreal Gazette – was granted protection from creditors under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA), ensuring that Canwest will be able to promptly and more profitably restructure its businesses without collapsing under the weight of its approximately $4-billion debt.

“We’re a very profitable company, [but] we had too much debt,” said Canwest CEO Leonard Asper in a public statement last week. “This is about getting rid of that debt and driving forward.”

In an article in the Financial Post, Canwest attributed its ailing financial condition to “a combination of declining ad revenues, slumping profitability, loss of audience, and the need to switch from analog to digital transmission.”

Filing for bankruptcy protection under the CCAA allows companies temporary relief from creditors while they restructure their businesses. Canwest presented a “pre-packaged plan of arrangement” to eventually settle their debts that was already approved by a majority of creditors. If the plan is approved by the court and the remaining creditors, CCAA protection can be extended for the duration of the restructuring.

“This virtually assures that the restructuring plan we set out will succeed,” Asper said. Once all groups are on board, Canwest’s business operations can go forward uninterrupted.

Bankruptcy protection will affect the debt related to approximately 30 per cent of Canwest’s revenue stream. Debt related to Canwest’s chain of 11 newspapers and the specialty TV channels it owns jointly with Goldman Sachs will be negotiated separately.

The post Canwest granted bankruptcy protection appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Pierre Savard of the École Polytechnique de Montreal led the audience through his research on the effects of electric stimulation on the human heart, demonstrating that use of electric stun guns can at times cause fatal complications.

“For many subjects with individual susceptibilities, the taser is in fact lethal,” Savard said, pointing out that individuals with heart disease and drug users face greater risks.

“The taser shock is analogous to the stress test hospitals give heart patients to test for defects,” Savard said. “These shocks stimulate flexors, extensors, and every nerve ending in the body.”

According to Savard, the danger present in these so-called “non-lethal weapons” is further exacerbated by what he saw as the RCMP’s gross overuse of tasers.

Savard illustrated this point with instances in which police used stun guns to wake up a subject sleeping on a bench and to pacify a grandmother who was making too much noise at a nursing home.

“It’s so easy to silence a subject [with a taser],” Savard said. “Too many policemen use it like the mute button on a remote control.”

Savard, a professor of electrical and biomedical engineering, began his investigation into taser safety after the October 2007 death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski.

Dziekanski could not understand English and became lost shortly after arriving at Vancouver International Airport. After an agitated Dziekanski threw a computer and small table to the ground, RCMP officers tasered him five times. Dziekanski died almost immediately.

Dziekanski’s death spurred a Michener Prize-winning CBC-Radio Canada investigation into taser safety, which found that at least 10 per cent of the stun guns currently in use in Canada malfunction outside of manufacturer specifications, putting subjects at greater risk of death.

Several individual police forces in Canada launched concurrent investigations that supported CBC-Radio Canada’s findings.

Based on these studies, groups like Amnesty International and the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP stepped forward, condemning taser overuse and urging a moratorium on stun guns until further research could be done.

Taser International, the sole manufacturer of tasers, responded dismissively to these studies.

Peter Holran, the company’s spokesman, called it regrettable that “false allegations based on scientifically flawed data” could raise such concerns and reaffirmed the quality of Taser International’s products.

Savard was concerned by Taser International’s lack of transparency. Savard noted that medical instrument manufacturers have “traceability,” meaning that a defective medical instrument can be traced piece by piece back to the raw materials, allowing selective safety recalls. Weapons manufacturers also undergo strict objective scrutiny from outside safety agencies. Tasers, however, qualify as neither medical instruments nor weapons, and are therefore subject only to the manufacturer’s testing standards.

Savard quipped, “If it’s not a weapon and it’s not medical equipment, it’s a toy.”

Tasers, however, still rank among police officers’ safest methods of applying force.

Savard cited a 2006-2007 study of Calgary police officers’ force interactions which demonstrated that out of all non-lethal force methods, stun gun interactions least frequently necessitated medical attention for the subject or the officer.

Savard himself admitted that tasers are among the safer means of subduing suspects, but firmly reiterated that more research into stun gun lethality, and more transparency in the manufacturing process are necessary if police officers are to continue using them on suspects.

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The die-in was spearheaded by the McGill Global AIDS Coalition (MGAC) and protested the inefficiency of Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR). The regime was passed in 2004 as an amendment to the Patent Act which allows drug manufacturers to synthesize cheaper versions of patented medications for export to countries that do not have access to them. However, CAMR has only exported AIDS drugs once since its establishment, sending drugs to Rwanda.

After about ten minutes on campus, the group of roughly 40 students marched to Phillip’s Square on Ste. Catherine, chanting “Children can’t wait, cut the red tape” and “Harper, stop acting like a fool, make CAMR a useful tool!”

The students repeated the demonstration across from The Bay, undeterred by the wind and rain. Volunteers circled the dead students and urged passersby to sign postcards to Parliament demanding CAMR reform.

“I think this was a great success,” said MGAC director Jamie Lundine, who distributed postcards for the duration of the protest. “We lasted a lot longer on campus than we expected and got more than 100 postcards signed.”

Joan Sherwin, a member of the Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign, which seeks to provide aid to Africa, joined the die-in in solidarity with MGAC.

“Canada needs to keep a full promise,” said Sherwin. “It’s time to pay our fair share of global aid.”

Apotex, a company that used CAMR to send HIV treatment to Rwanda in 2008, has committed to sending pediatric formulas of AIDS medication to Africa only if Canadian export restrictions are made less cumbersome and costly. Several MGAC volunteers wearing pill bottle costumes struggled against a stretch of red cloth to symbolize the red tape that has bogged down the delivery of AIDS medication to developing countries.

MGAC has hosted a multitude of on-campus AIDS awareness events this year, including World AIDS Week in November and a Disparity Dinner in March. The die-in was MGAC’s final event of the school year, which coincided with a long-awaited development in Canada’s foreign aid.

Last Wednesday, federal Senator Yoine Goldstein tabled legislation to streamline the complicated processes resulting from CAMR. Lundine hoped that further improvements would be made to CAMR legislation in the coming year.

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The $1.3-billion redevelopment project, entrusted to Devimco Inc. last year by the municipal government, has already been scaled back 70 per cent due to economic woes. In February, Devimco President Serge Goulet told La Presse that without substantial municipal funding it could not go forward.

“If the City is not involved in one way or another, nothing will be finished before 2013…and the City needs these projects,” Goulet said in French.

The local government has so far steadfastly refused to either publicly accede to Devimco’s demand or announce that the project’s status is anything but full steam ahead. However, City Hall voted in mid-February to cancel over two dozen expropriation orders and land reserves set aside for the development, suggesting that the project has indeed been terminated.

In the two years since its introduction, critics ranging from bloggers to city councillors have decried the development plan – to raze most of the neighbourhood, and replace it with a cinema complex, shopping centre, and concert venue – as a heartless makeover for a neighbourhood that was one of Montreal’s vibrant industrial hubs barely a century ago.

“What they attempted to do did not respect the historical context of the place,” said Avi Friedman, professor of architecture and cofounder and director of McGill’s Affordable Homes Program. Friedman condemned Devimco’s “big-box” design as yielding a community of blank walls that would not be livable or walkable.

“[The project] was a mix of suburbia and shopping centre that really doesn’t belong in Montreal…or if it does, we have enough of it.”

The city government also drew fire for entrusting an entire neighbourhood’s redevelopment to just one company. In a scathing press release last month, opposition city councillor Benoit Labonté castigated the current administration for relying too heavily on mega-projects.

Professor Raphael Fischler of McGill’s School of Urban Planning, an outspoken critic of the project since its conception in 2007, agreed that putting all of Griffintown’s eggs in one basket was dangerous and unhealthy.

“One single large project like Devimco’s… tends to create homogenous environments, and we know that diversity and spontaneity are what creates great neighbourhoods,” Fischler said.

According to Fischler, a city can redevelop a neighbourhood in one of two ways: from the top down, by entrusting the project to one developer and following one blueprint from the start, or from the bottom up, by allowing individual property owners to pursue their own projects over time. Fischler thought the latter method was neglected with the Griffintown development.

“We went too far to the one pole of single-handed redevelopment and too far from other pole of spontaneous development with more actors and diversity. You always need a little of both,” Fischler said.

He emphasized that while the organic bottom-up approach creates a sturdy blend of residences and activities, the City needs to set developmental guidelines to ensure progress and block undesirable elements like high-rises.

“I’ve seen a lot of small changes in the past three years,” said Mathieu Ouellette, a third-year student at the École de téchnologie supérieure located in Griffintown’s outskirts. While Ouellette expects to finish school before any major changes take place, he commented, “In five years, I think the neighbourhood will look very different.”

Friedman agreed that the neighbourhood’s proximity to downtown makes the land so precious that the City should not have trouble finding more sensible developers.

“It’s better to wait a little bit and get a good project than to get an eyesore that will last for decades.”

with files from Braden Goyette

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At approximately 12:28 p.m., each member of the “flash mob” struck a pose with a Nuit Blanche sign for four minutes. Passersby were forced to thread their way through the frozen students, many of them pausing to stare at the impromptu wax museum.

“It’s freaking me out,” said John Paul Tasker, U0 Arts, who was eating lunch on the Redpath ledge when the mob materialized. “I feel like I’m at a funeral.”

“I like it,” chimed in Alanna Marcellus, U0 Education. “But I think they need more people to get a real effect.”

Participants adopted various poses with their signs. Some students were content to act as human signposts; others pretended to freeze mid-conversation, while reading textbooks or magazines, or, in one girl’s case, halfway through an apple. All held their positions, no matter how closely passersby examined them.

“People came right up to my face,” recalled mobber and Nuit Blanche coordinator Amelie Dinh, who laughed and added, “Time passes slowly when you’re frozen.”

Celeste Pang, who gave the flash mob its starting and ending cues, was enthusiastic about this novel method of promoting Nuit Blanche’s second year.

“We’ve been putting up posters and flyers,” said Pang, “but this is a really cool way to publicize.”

Publicity stunts like the flash mob, that depend on a critical mass of participants and the element of surprise, have become more popular in recent years with the advent of streaming online video and Youtube extending their reach beyond passersby.

Although Dinh has previously participated in similar events in the Montreal and Toronto areas, including flash dance mobs and subway parties, this was her first time organizing such an event and she was pleased with the outcome.

“Everyone involved had fun. We were hoping for more traffic, but we obviously can’t control that.”

The mob was organized in February via a secret Facebook event and relied on invited friends and word of mouth to assemble. “We were expecting more participants,” Dinh said, “but something like this only appeals to certain people.”

Lack of traffic and participants notwithstanding, Pang was proud of the amount of people who spent part of their afternoon standing rigid in the cold. While the Fine Arts Council is far from abandoning traditional poster-and-flyer methods of advertising, Pang was optimistic about the future of such alternative publicity methods.

Dinh agreed, adding that such publicity stunts and Nuit Blanche’s flash mob make passersby rethink the way we use public spaces.

“It’s art in and of itself, which is the whole point of Nuit Blanche.”

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“We’re past the language thing,” said Brent Platt, co-chairman of QCGN’s Youth Standing Committee. “Youth are feeling positive about the language separation, and they don’t fear assimilation.”

The Youth Standing Committee spearheaded the 32-page report that lays out a framework for integrating young anglophones and francophones in Quebec. The report opens by citing a 2006 Statistics Canada report that found that over the previous 15 years, the number of 20-34-year-old English-speakers in Quebec dropped by one-fifth, and develops a series of aspirations and solutions designed to remedy the isolation many English-speaking youth feel in Quebec.

Platt stressed that although the report contains enough statistics and empirical data to resonate with Quebec’s policymakers, this was a youth-managed project run by the same people whose identification with Quebec culture it seeks to remedy. Consequently, Platt has noticed strong positive reactions to Creating Spaces from readers of all ages.

The project aims to improve Quebec’s youth community from the inside out: slow the drain of Quebec’s anglophones by integrating the English-speaking and francophone communities. Creating Spaces also seeks to build a strong, diverse youth network that will in turn attract further culturally diverse youth to Quebec through education, employment, and community life.

The project, however, does not end with the report. Platt called it a “gateway document” – a blueprint for future endeavours to unify the English and French youth communities.

Even so, Platt and the QCGN recognize that there is no quick fix to issues of cultural isolation in Quebec.

“This is something we’ll need to take one baby step at a time,” Platt said. “But we’re very, very optimistic.”

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The report, Creating Spaces, was commissioned by the Quebec Community Group Network, and called biliteracy “a powerful tool to tackle many multi-faceted barriers English-speakers face in participating fully in Quebec society.” It also declared full biliteracy for Quebec youth as one of its top goals. Bilingualism designates functionality in both languages without specifying the user’s full capacity in either, and biliteracy is best described as full spoken, reading, and written fluency in two languages.

According to Gregg Blachford, Director of McGill’s Career Planning Services while functional oral bilingualism is probably most common in the workforce, biliterates have a much broader range of opportunities available to them.

But biliteracy is not valued as highly in McGill society as functional or even minimal bilingualism: upon graduation, many students seek careers outside of the province, where standards for English-French bilingualism are much lower.

Blachford noted that McGill may make an English life all too easy for students. Many, even those with backgrounds in French immersion programs, allow their French to stagnate in McGill’s anglo environment. This isn’t always evident, as McGill is located in the centre of one of the world’s most culturally diverse cities; fluency in two languages might seem like a given.

“Within the McGill ghetto walls… [students’] confidence and ability in French drops, despite Montreal,” Blachford said.

Low confidence in French is a common excuse for settling into an English rut and one of the greatest barriers to biliteracy, according to McGill Psychology professor Fred Genesee, who specializes in bilingual education and psycholinguistics.

“It’s a two-way street,” Genesee said. “The more you use [French], the more confident you’ll become.”

Students who can improve their French confidence and become functionally bilingual are in good shape. In Genesee’s experience, English to French bilinguals often have little difficulty segueing into biliteracy.

Blachford encouraged students to feel confident in their French, even if they perceive it as sub-par.

“Don’t giggle; don’t apologize; don’t signal bad confidence in your French,” Blachford said. “Know a few key phrases, some opening chit-chat, and don’t be self-conscious.”

Genesee noticed French students who come to McGill with little or no English background leave comfortable and confident with the language, bolstering both Genesee’s and Blachford’s conclusion that immersion is key.

Genesee also urged anglophone students to take full advantage of the opportunities in Montreal for obtaining biliteracy.

“[Biliteracy] is where the rest of the world is moving,” Genesee said. “Montreal has a good start; we just need to take advantage of it.”

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