I am at the annual McGill Society of Physics Students (MSPS)  talent show. We are at a bar, a handful of blocks away from campus. The night kicked off with a performance of  the Red Shift Blues, which features department head Charles Gale and Dean of Science Martin Grant. But the adults are gone now.

As the class clown begins discussing an erection (his? I can’t remember), I pull my Android out of my purse and fiddle with the record function. The thing that now exists in my iTunes is 24 minutes long. Its contents mostly concern male masturbation, but it also  –  okay, this is your trigger warning – includes a hypothetical scene in which the speaker goes to a restaurant to shove meatballs up the asses of his co-diners, in order to render their assholes bloody.

And a description of what Mike thinks of when he sees a cute girl: “Oooh booty. Oh, that looks good. Oh those [synonym for breasts]. I want to put my face in them and – ” he makes a bububbbbb sound.  “Look at her mouth.” Beat. “I want to put my penis in your mouth.’”

“Now you see exactly where I’m going,” he says. This is gross-out humour. This is Seth MacFarlane at the Oscars, less refined.

And then – a joke about a baby, the baby’s parents, and oral sex. (The flimsy set-up: Freudian psychology is fucked up, because you know, kids love their parents.)

I am sitting at the front of the room. Mike’s followed his joke with the words, “it would feel good.” The two people sitting on either side of me are not laughing.

But, it seems, we are surrounded by laughter.

“I was just being me,” Mike tells me later.

In October, I wrote an article in The Daily titled “Fine men, sexist pigs”, (Commentary, October 11, page 7) outlining the chilly climate that I have experienced in the Physics department. Though condensed and exaggerated on the MSPS’s talent show stage, Mike is a prime example of the kind of behaviour that contributes to it, the kind of behaviour that objectifies women and trivializes sexual consent. This behaviour is not limited to McGill – following my article, I received many emails and nods of support from women (mostly women, anyway) outside McGill. Nor is it limited to the science and tech community – take Ayla Lefkowitz’s article on a rugby banquet last year (“Dresses, Drinks, Mysogyny,” Commentary, February 2, 2012) in which, among other things, the attendees sing a song that goes: “I wish that all the ladies / were like the statue of Venus / because then they wouldn’t have any arms… to shove away my penis!”

But the fact that rape jokes and objectification of women are in any way an acceptable part of the fabric of this community is not okay. I like this department. I’ve had a great time here. In retrospect, even the heavy workload was okay.

Chandra Curry, MSPS VP Academic, tells me over breakfast at Cora’s a couple days later that if people had been booing, she would have pulled Mike off stage (she didn’t hear the act, she was busy running the show). Mike had the support of the audience. The MSPS talent show committee had asked participants to submit proposals for their acts (no one was turned down); in attempt to draw a line,  she had asked Mike specifically if he would say anything that would offend her. “My trust – mine, as well as [that of] the entire committee – went too far,” she said.

She gives me Mike’s name and number – I had known him as just, ‘one of the loud kids who is usually playing foosball’ – and tells him to expect a call.

“Jokes by definition should not be taken seriously,” he tells me. “If you are offended, I am sorry, but you should grow up.”

To say that jokes are not serious is a ludicrous statement. I love comedy and I will defend my half-hour of weekly Parks and Recreation time like my life depends on it. Comedy is a great part of our culture, not just because it allows us to relieve mental burdens, lose our breath, and bond: it allows us to explore parts of our life that can feel out of reach in the realm of seriousness – from silly embarrassing moments, to, yes, even rape (see Lindy West’s “How to make a rape joke”). In Mike’s case, comedy seems to serve as a haphazard expression of his sexuality (masturbation), as well a as power play.

Much like sex, which runs the gamut from serious to funny, stress-relieving, to therapeutic – even in its most frivolous and fleeting expressions, never wholly meaningless – comedy can be wielded as an expression and reaffirmation of one’s power over others.

For Mike, all that nuance and respect for comedy just doesn’t exist.

“Is there any joke you wouldn’t make?” I ask him.

“One that’s not funny. If people don’t laugh, then I feel bad.”

He is planning on doing stand up again. He had fun. People liked it.

Shannon Palus is about to graduate with a B.Sc. in Physics. Reach her at shannon.palus@gmail.com.

The post Surely you’re joking appeared first on The McGill Daily.

There is one thing about the impact of science that we know for certain: it’s messy, it’s nuanced, it’s hard to pin down. That’s why accurate, sensible, and accessible science journalism is important, because it sure is easy to lose yourself – either as a reporter or a consumer – in a narrative that reduces the multitude of information available to something far less than the sum of their parts.

As consumers, our access to the latest research is often reduced to science that is ‘quirky’ and ‘fun.’ Stories about animals that have funny eyes, dinosaurs having sex – that sort of thing.

Don’t get us wrong: we don’t hate fun. We can’t stop listening to Taylor Swift’s “22” on repeat at the moment. But when ‘quirky’ has a monopoly on the market, it’s undermining. And it is a market, now more than ever a quick scramble to shake ducats out of the couch cushions as the smoke from the dying embers of print media starts to fill the living room. And fun shouldn’t be confused with sensationalism – though sensationalism sure does shake out more ducats.

Take the Popular Science feature from the September 2012 issue – an issue with a car on the cover – entitled “Labs that go BOOM.” Feminist blog Jezebel published on October 18 an article headlined “Turns out, baby blood might be the actual fountain of youth.” Even Scientific American, which calls itself “the leading source and authority for science, technology information, and policy for a general audience,” has fallen to the temptation of dramatic headlines at times. Sensationalist titles from past issues include: “Is Your Child Gay?” and “Microbes Manipulate Your Mind.”

And when big breakthroughs are made and reported on, we are given two choices: we can choose to consume the version published in Science or Nature, filled with graphs and acronyms most of the population are not equipped to decipher, or the version published in popular media, the version that glosses over facts and tries to lure us in with “Marijuana fights cancer” or asserts that eating an omelette is more dangerous than having a smoke. But what we want is the in-between: the factual but accessible narrative, devoid of complex statistics but also of overreaching headlines and sensational language.

This is, we know, a tall order. As current and former editors of this section, we know how hard it is to tease out truths, and incorporate them into narratives that are truly engaging, and equally truth-y. (And it turned out that Jonah Lehrer, the poster boy of spinning beautiful narratives, was making things up in order to do it.) It is hard when you’re filling a pitch quota to not go for the low-hanging fruit. But it’s frustrating for us to see the field devolving into an entity that is far from all that we feel it should be. It shows when we interview people: we have to convince sources that we’re not going to mangle their words; we have to explain that, yes, we are just as invested in not printing things that are not true about your lab as you are. It shows when we tell our science friends what we do – like maybe we’re out to take what they love and print a caricature of it in the newspaper.

So: be friendly to your neighbourhood science journalist. If you’re a scientist, make an effort to engage; if you’re a reader, don’t roll your eyes at all of us just because you read something you dislike on Gawker (we probably dislike it too!). And if you’re a writer, never, ever skimp on the facts to churn things out faster. (If you’re a freelancer – well, sometimes you have to take a paycheck where you can get it.)

Here is what we like: We like David Eagleman, explaining how the brain spins for us a seamless illusion of an imperfect reality. We like Alan Lightman’s prose, Richard Feynman (yeah, the sexist guy!) for his stories about puttering around Los Alamos, and Rebecca Skloot for uncovering the truth about HeLa cells. We like the days and years that come between publications, the second-guesses, the trials and errors, the outtakes.

Science is a beautiful, messy endeavour. Science writing, when done right, can help advance our society in the concerted human effort to understand our world. Science journalism connects us to a continual quest for knowledge, and in that endeavour, its reach can be incredibly wide – but it also has far to fall.

The post From quarks to quirk appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Ben and I are both in Physics – but to say that we are in it together would be a bit of a stretch.

Just over 20 per cent of the undergraduate physics department is female – roughly on par with other universities. In the McGill Physics Lounge, next to posters of galaxies, a foosball table, and a recently installed coffee station, you can hear comments that might make you wonder why the 20 per cent of us even bother to show up.

For example, a boy convincing another boy to attend a party argues, “Dude, just come, there will be so many sick bitches everywhere, out on a shelf like in Walmart.”

Last year, a member of McGill Society of Physics Students (MSPS) explained to me that it would be fun to rearrange their acronym to “PUSS,” as in ‘pussy.’

This degrading talk makes for a “chilly climate” – a term coined by feminist scholar Bernice R. Sandler. She explains in a report titled “The Chilly Classroom Climate” that these everyday remarks “ultimately undermine girls’ and women’s self confidence in their academic ability, lower their academic and occupational aspirations, inhibit their learning, and generally lower their self-esteem.” And the people perpetuating the chilly climate are not, necessarily, committed to the idea that women do not belong in physics – I am reminded, via email, that the pussy comment was meant “jokingly.”  This everyday sexism is more than, as one male peer suggested, a shut-and-closed case of ‘boorish-dorks-being-unclassy.’

A recent Yale study found that female applicants (for a fictional lab position) were consistently ranked lower in terms of competence and “hireability”; they were offered a lower starting salary, and scientists expressed less interest in mentoring the fictional female applicant.

I’ve supported and defended this sexist climate, somewhat explicitly, to an extent: I lived with guys – Ben and two others – because guys were just easier to get along with than “catty” girls. Evenings out ended with them verbally dissecting the lumps of human flesh visible through that one girl-at-the-party’s American Apparel dress. I told them I’d rather they didn’t filter out the sexist comments.  In order to fit in, I tried to make myself okay with their standards.

There is a name for the type of woman I was being: a loophole woman. She sees her presence in a male-dominated space as an exception. She knows that women aren’t inclined toward numbers-based subjects, but she is, and she’s proud of it.

It’s an understandable defense mechanism – survive, fit in, make yourself more masculine. But this method of declaring myself separate from other women – able to dish and take sexist remarks – wasn’t, in the end, just damaging to me; it’s also not really the best way to go about changing things.

The gender gap is, however, steadily shrinking as other efforts to do away with sexist notions and the chilly climate are being made. A report by the National Academy of Science concluded that this narrowing divide indicates the difference in turnout between men and women in hard sciences is better explained by cultural, rather than biological, differences.

Efforts are also being made in the Rutherford Physics building: as of January, there are now five (five out of forty professors) female physics professors on staff. Assistant Professor Tracy Webb tells me that they meet on a regular basis, and are looking to start a mentoring program for female undergrads.

But if we want to encourage women to stay in Physics, we have to examine the day-to-day ways that we enforce the notion that women are less than men.

In the months that followed Ben’s comment that I was “just being a catty girl,” my relationship with him disintegrated into passive aggression (him), and slammed doors (me). I am not up for staying somewhere where I feel so fundamentally unwelcome. I posted an ad on Craigslist for a lease transfer, and I moved out.

*name has been changed

Shannon Palus is a U3 Physics student and a member of the Daily Publications Society Board of Directors. She likes quantum mechanics, and having feelings and would definitely love to hear from you. She can be reached at shannon.palus@gmail.com.

The post Fine men, sexist pigs appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The site, known as Smart Minerva, is a scheduling interface that allows students to type in McGill courses and gain access to all of the possible schedules, and CRN codes. Students can then register on the Minerva site by typing in a few numbers, rather than wading through all the scheduling options for courses.

Daskalov put up two different versions of the wall – one that allowed students to access the site after providing their email, and another that did not allow students access to the site at all. The second wall read, “Smart Minerva is struggling to breathe.”

He also started a Facebook event titled “Smarten up, McGill,” in which he urged students to email McGill IT. “Tell them you need Smart Minerva to register,” it read. He later took down the wall, explaining that it was “too cruel not to allow access.”

Smart Minerva is not “under direct threat” by McGill; Daskalov clarified in an interview with the Daily. He also said he could no longer keep maintaining the site for free, and he plans to open source the code if nothing happens as a result of the campaign.

Daskalov started the website in 2008 during his first year at McGill, after being frustrated with Minerva. He has been running it in his free time for just over four years.

The site seems most popular among first year science and engineering students. “When you have a lot of labs to schedule and there are 10 or 15 choices for all of those it’s easier to get visuals of how that would look instead of drawing out charts,” says Anqi Zhang, a U2 Neuroscience student and Daily staffer who joined the Facebook group.

“I always recommend it to lower level students,” says Clarence Leung, a member of the Wikinotes team, in an email to the Daily, adding that the members of the team had all joined the Facebook group as well. Daskalov supports open source software, and is “ an extremely capable software developer,” he explained.

In July, during registration for first years, Daskalov put up a page on the site for one day – similar to the one that was up earlier this week – that asked students to email McGill IT and tell them to fund Smart Minerva.

“ I don’t think [McGill IT] had a sense of just how useless Minerva was,” he said in an email.

According to Daskalov, as a result of the email campaign, he began talking to McGill IT.

“When Alex graduated he offered us the system. But we have legal requirements with purchasing,” explains McGill Chief Information Officer, Ghilaine Roquet.

“Minerva as a presentation interface for students leaves [something] to be desired,” she says. “It’s the first thing I hear from students – please replace Minerva. Smart Minerva was a very interesting development,” she added.

Last fall a selection committee composed of IT and McGill enrolment services members looked at options for making the registration portion of Minerva run more smoothly.

Daskalov explained to The Daily that he was told a decision would be made by October; according to Roquet the selection process was delayed due to the MUNACA strike.

This committee ended up choosing another student-built system called Visual Schedule Builder, in use at Concordia. Alan Weeks, a former student at Concordia, is behind the project.

“We found that it was preferred…and it was also less expensive,” Roquet says, explaining that student focus groups favored the other program. Visual Schedule Builder is slated to go live in May at McGill, in time for the incoming class of 2012.

In addition to showing different combinations of schedules, as Smart Minerva does, Visual Schedule will include maps indicating where classes are located, and a search function to allow students to view courses offered by a specific professor.

Dasklov was unaware that another student initiative was chosen instead of Smart Minerva.  “I was told in February, it’s not going to be yours,” Dasklov said. Later in an email he wrote: “Yea, that’s interesting, except that they never themselves told me that, which would’ve been nice.”

“I don’t want to disparage the value of the [Smart Minerva] application,” said Roquet. “I think it is a good application, and it has value – if we didn’t think so, we wouldn’t be looking to put in place a solution that offers that service. When you do that, you have to look at everything and chose the one that is preferred by your users.”

The post Students look for Minerva revamp appeared first on The McGill Daily.

We’re sitting on bar stools around the island of her parents’ kitchen, in a suburb of Philadelphia. This is where we sat senior year of high school – high, eating cookie dough, picking over hook-up prospects; where, in grade five, we ate grilled cheese and talked about the cutest boy in the class.

Now, it’s summer break, and we’re halfway through university. Nicole’s been struggling with depression, and until recently she’s been taking Effexor, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), the most commonly prescribed class of anti-depression medication. Though we’re still talking about sex, we’re tuned into something a little darker this time.

The listed side effects of taking SSRIs include: headache, dry mouth, anxiety, nausea, diarrhea, insomnia, sleeplessness. In 2000, a twelve year-old who had been on Paxil for seven months hung herself. So, to this day SSRIs in the United States carry a black-box warning about suicide. But lurking in the drug pamphlet of every SSRI, somewhere between the media-hyped worst-case scenarios, and the string of mundanities that typically fade after a week or two, are the words “sexual dysfunction.”

The list of conditions that fall under that term could hold its own in a fine-print contest.  In no particular order: no or lower libido, delayed orgasm, anorgasmia (no orgasm), pleasureless orgasm, erectile dysfunction, problems with arousal (unspecified), and possibly genital anesthesia (in which genitals are no more useful for pleasure than, say, your arm is).

These side effects reportedly hit between 2 and 70 per cent of patients on SSRIs – the number varies study to study, depending on how the study is done. In studies where you wait for patients to bring up sexual dysfunction, a comparatively small number report having it; but when the question is asked specifically, reports always clock in at 30 per cent at least. It all makes the little, bouncing genital-less smiley faces in those Zoloft ads seem more than a little wicked.

Ben Goldacre, a doctor and Guardian columnist, lays out the stakes involved in drug-induced sexual dysfunction in his book Bad Science.

“I’m trying to phrase this as neutrally as possible,” Goldacre writes. “I really enjoy the sensation of orgasm. It’s important to me, and everything I experience in the world tells me that this sensation is important to other people too. Wars have been fought, essentially, for the sensation of orgasm.”

***

Nicole had taken Effexor for nearly a year, however, our topic of conversation that afternoon – about whether it affected her sexual function – was one that she had not even broached with the doctor that put her on the medication.

Audrey Bahrick, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, explains that the decision to take medication should be one of “informed consent.”   Patients should have an understanding of the benefits and downsides of the medication, including the possibility that it’ll mess with your sex life.

“It almost sounds trivial,” says Bahrick. You might be prepared to cope with a little loss of libido. “But it can be much more. It can be really quite a pervasive change.”

Studies clearly show that patients will, far more often than not,  fail to bring up sexual side effects unless specifically asked. This is especially true when patients have just 15 minutes with a general practitioner before being shoved out the door. (A game to play at McGill Health Services: get a doctor to prescribe you an SSRI, see if they bring up the birds and the bees.)

Prior to prescribing an SSRI, doctors need to suss out a “baseline” – or typical sexual function  – with patients first, explains Bahrick. If you have a solid idea going into  taking the medication of what your sexual function is like, it’s easier to know if the drug is taking something away.

Though Bahrick does not prescribe drugs, as a psychologist she is directly involved in patient’s treatment plans. She sees the 18 to 22 year olds that she works with as an especially vulnerable population, as their baseline of sexual function isn’t as firmly established as it is for adults.

Further, women’s sexuality risks being ignored: if a man cannot get an erection or stays hard for too long (one man I spoke to described “erections that last forever”), it seems to be a clear, easy-to-explain problem. When a women can’t reach orgasm, however, it may be harder to recognize that as an issue.

“We know a whole lot more about men’s experience. They’re a lot easier to study,” says Bahrick.

***

It turns out this is true in more ways than one. Anita Clayton, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who works with drug companies to study side effects of SSRIs, explains that it’s harder to get government funding to study female sexual dysfunction. “I think there’s a cultural and institutional bias against women and their sexuality, that it needs to be contained,” she says. “And I think that much of that influences the funding to do studies.”  She cites abstinence-only education as another factor impeding a meaningful discourse on the subject.

Abstinence-only education isn’t good – this is true. But the problem is deeper than that.  Its not just that sexual function is hard to study, or that it’s harder to study in women – it’s that sex is, even in some of the best of cultural conditions, defined in a male-centric and heterosexist way. It’s reduced to the male orgasm, the act of intercourse, a penis entering a vagina and depositing an amount of sperm. Women’s pleasure – which often stems from acts other than vaginal intercourse – is taken for granted or ignored altogether.

These complications apply to people like me and Nicole, too, who were not products of abstinence-only education – quite the opposite, in fact. Over the years, we’ve rented the movie All I Wanna Do from the now-bankrupt video store so many times that we might as well have been charged as responsible for wearing out the tape. In it, Kirsten Dunst goes to an all-girls boarding school, and fights the oppressive rule against wearing jewelry, and, most importantly, the one about not having male visitors. She and her cohorts skirmish with the nighttime chaperones, essentially, for the sake of getting laid.

Everything about our world told us that Dunst was right. We were taught that – should we somehow ever find ourselves apparrated to a conservative boarding school – the right to still have sex was one worth losing our dining hall privileges over. In grade five, volunteers from Planned Parenthood played the “penis game” with us, in which everyone shouted out words for genitalia at the top of their lungs, as though our yelling could hit a frequency that would shatter the playground stigmas. The school nurse had free condoms on hand, in case, it seemed, of an emergency.

In our liberal world of readily available condoms and birth control, we were free to have intercourse. But sex is brilliantly multifaceted  – desire and dysfunction aren’t always easily identified. And yet what dominates the discourse is a binary language: yes or no, penetration or not. From nosy peers: “how many people have you slept with?”; from doctors, “are you sexually active?”

If there is an erection going into a vagina, according to this way of thinking, the system is functional – enough to count as active, enough to make another notch in the bedpost. The dysfunctions experienced by men can more clearly fall under this straight-and-narrow definition.

Bahrick mentions a female she treated who said that she was not concerned about sexual side effects – she had a boyfriend, but they were not having intercourse; sexual side effects didn’t have anything to do with her.

Female arousal is more complex, and hidden, both physiologically and culturally: women do not necessarily have orgasms with every act of intercourse, though the clitoris swells when aroused, it is out of sight.

While male cum featured – necessarily, it felt – in many of my teenage conversations with Nicole, female pleasure came up explicitly for the first time that summer afternoon. It was part of her sexual baseline that she hadn’t quite bothered to look into before.

In grade ten sex ed, the subject of female masturbation came up once. Later at track practice a friend asked me, “Does anyone do that?”

***

For Bahrick, the problem is scarier than just asking the right questions, or being sensitive to the fact that a patient might not yet have discovered their baseline of sexual function. Much of her work comes from the first-hand accounts of people on SSRIs, people who have been on them for longer than the standard eight-week trial that it takes to get the drug approved by the FDA. Her findings are drawn from both patients in her office, and members of a Yahoo discussion group called SSRIsex. There are things lurking here that are deeply sinister: accounts of people going on SSRIs, losing their sexual function and never getting it back.

The mainstream medical community has not accepted the notion of post SSRI sexual dysfunction – there is no research that proves it. It could turn out to be as invalid as the link between vaccines and cognitive diseases. But, unlike Jenny McCarthy’s choice cause, no research has been done to show for sure that there isn’t a link between post-treatment sexual dysfunction and SSRIs, either.  This is the scary thing about these drugs – if there are long-term side effects, ones that extend beyond the eight-week trials, we’re currently testing them in situ, on millions of people.

“We need to talk about what we don’t know,” she continues. Post-SSRI sexual side effects are not accepted by the mainstream medical community. Still, in the past decade, studies on suicidal thoughts and SSRIs have shown that the twelve year-old’s death was likely not caused by the drug, and yet the drugs still carry warnings. Better to err on the safe side.

***

It is strange that a solution to happiness could rob us of sex. A drug called Viibryd hit the market in early 2011; the data, at glance, indicates that it might sidestep this paradox (can’t you feel that sentiment pumping through its name?). If you look at the drug insert material, rates of sexual dysfunction clock in around 2 per cent. The FDA approved the drug – but not the claim that it offers superior sexual function, as the study only compared rates of side effects in Viibryd to a placebo, not to another SSRI. In spite of its questionable accuracy, the 2 per cent figure was out: it made the media rounds, landing headlines on news websites from Salon to ABCNews.

The fact that patients are looking for a better SSRI, though, is a positive step: When Prozac first hit the market, studies that asked specifically about sexual side effects weren’t even being done. If you have a drug that really does reduce side effects, that would be a brilliant thing to market. “Yes, and if you have one that is going to be negative, you want to know that too, because it might negatively affect the treatment plan,” Clayton says earnestly.

She dismisses the claim that SSRIs can cause post-treatment sexual dysfunction – there are psychological factors to explain the post SSRI libido drop. “The number of these reports is so low. If that is the case, it’s just a coincidence,” she says, though quickly adding, “in my opinion.”

There is one more striking – and perhaps crucial – difference between the emphases of Clayton, who works hand in hand with big pharma, and Bahrick, who is a psychologist, and spends much of her time with patients. While Bahrick uses the language of “informed consent”, in her literature, Clayton uses the typical pharma language of “treatment compliance.”

“‘Treatment compliance’  is a term suggesting a more passive, less collaborative role of the patient and a more paternal role of the prescriber,” explains Bahrick. The term is out of favor with pyschologists, for this reason. “Yet the language of ‘compliance’ does still seem ever-present in the sexual side effects literature, i.e. – the side effects pose a risk to treatment compliance.” For Bahrick, a patient who sees sexual side effects as a reason to not take a drug has a valid point.

In high school, we poured over consensual sex for hours in the classroom, reading stories, running through hypothetical scenarios, like militia running though war theory. What we weren’t taught was about how to say yes or no to a drug, to a company; what violation of your self happens when you swallow a pill. What we weren’t taught is that we were entitled to explore a range of feeling, including feelings that that might take time to figure out.

I ask Clayton what she says when patients decline drugs because of side effects. “In those patients what are we going to do?” she replies, implying annoyance. “Shove it down their throats?”

***

It is winter break, 2011, and six months have passed since Nicole stopped taking medication. Though she sees a pyschiatrist regularly – and did make it through the bulk of her depression while on meds – she’s also started doing yoga and writing more in an effort to feel better.

One evening a few days before Christmas, we take the train downtown, watch a local band play a few songs at an Irish bar, and then wander out onto 12th street. It is our first time going out in Philly since we reached the legal drinking age. In a moment of abandon, we pop into a club called iCandy: a pocket of techno and rainbow strobe lights in the mild winter, encased in revolution-era brick. We take our seats on bar stools at a table for two, and a man wearing nothing but a santa hat and red briefs serves us rounds of twizzler-flavored test tube shots.

It’s one of those moments when I feel like I have wandered out of my own life and onto a movie set. I check to see that we’re still wearing the cardigans that we left the house in.  We’re off script this time: happiness and pleasure are things that aren’t necessarily tied to a chemical or a sexual conquest. We’ve learned the lessons of Dunst characters – the ones who risk it all for the act of sex under its strictest definition – and now we’re leaving them behind.

When Nicole weaned herself off the anti-depressants, she told me about how she opened up each individual plastic pill and dumped out the hundreds of tiny white beads that contained the drug. First, four every day, then, a week later, eight, and so on, until there were none left to spill out.

Now, in the bar, a small pile of glassware accumulates in front of us, as we become drunker in fifty-milliliter doses of alcohol and syrup. Nicole leans forward.

“It happened,” she says, smiling and shrugging at the same time. “I had one.”

*Name has been changed

The post Killing your sex life? appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“Increased representation on key decision-making bodies…[is] the only way to ensure that our voices are not only listened to, but heard in the future,” said McGill occupier Mera Thompson, as quoted in Vol 86 Issue 68 of the Daily.

The McGill Reporter also covered the occupation; article here.

The post From the archives appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The event, co-hosted by Montreal group Startupifier and the McGill group Tech Think Tank, invited the Montreal community to come together to develop web applications. After a brainstorming session on Friday night, programmers and designers formed ten teams of two to five people. They reconvened on Saturday at 9 a.m. to start their day of developing.

Marc Beaupre, current member of Startupifier and former McGill student, and his team met each other at the event pitch session the previous Friday night. The application that they were working on was called, “Snap to Vote,” which he described as a “+1 button for the real world.” (In Facebook language, that’s a “like” button.) The app allows people to print out QR codes – those futuristic 2-D barcode squares that you may have seen – and stick them on things. This allows smartphone users to snap a picture of the barcode, thus registering a vote for that object, whatever it is. Beaupre explained that the Hackathon provides a space to have fun and explore a project: “You pare your idea down to the core; figure out the central utility, so that you can complete it on time.” The event is judged by a panel comprised of individuals from various Montreal startups. At the end of the event Snap to Vote won the title of “Most Accomplished in a Single Day.”

Other groups went into the coding session with a fully-formed team already assembled. Wikinotes was one such group, and their plan was to revamp their existing McGill note sharing site with a special focus on making the site more accessible for all students to share lecture notes, since, right now, it’s mostly admins that contribute. They started the project one year ago, and it originally ran on free Wikipedia-style software, beginning as a way for them to share notes for a couple of courses that the group members had in common.  They ended up snagging the title “Good Citizen Award,” along with a spot in the top three, an honour that also rewarded them with free web hosting services. The group members said that they welcomed the opportunity to spend ten straight hours working on their site, and drinking free coffee. Although they’ve come up against some resistance from the administration – particularly with regards to copyrighted material from course lectures – they were all smiles when I spoke to them a few days after their win, explaining that it was nice to get recognition from the judges for their work. “We feel that students should be able to share notes and help each other.” “We believe that information should be free, and collaboration should be possible,” says Wendy Liu, a U2 math and computer science student.

Tech Think Tank was co-founded last spring by Jon Volkmar, a U3 Computer science student at McGill. Volkmar described the group’s purpose as gathering students interested in technology at McGill to collaborate on events like the Hackathon, and even to explore projects beyond McGill. Volkmar’s group worked on a Facebook game application called, “Coolspace,” which received a nod for “Most Creative.”

“You learn a lot of stuff that you won’t learn in school,” Volkmar says of events like the Hackathon. Software programming is something he plans on pursuing once he finishes school, an ability proven by his internship at Microsoft this past summer. He describes it as a surreal experience – navigating the infrastructure of such a huge organization was nothing like the start-up like environment at the Notman house. Volkmar added, “I find the idea of bringing up your own project that means a lot to you, and that you have a lot of input and control over, and that really builds community to be a really attractive idea. But there’s good things about working for corporations also.”

The next Hackathon will be hosted at the Notman house on January 20 to 21, 2011. 

Snap to vote can be found at snaptovote.com. Learn more about Tech Think Tank at tt.cs.mcgill.ca. Email admin@wikinotes.ca to learn more about or colloborate with the Wikinotes team. 

The post Coding, coffee, and concrete innovation appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The WOW Lab officially kicked off on September 17, 2007. The Imperial Oil Foundation founded the lab as a gift, an $800,000 gift, which is still the sum total of the lab’s funding. Everything from the orange paint on the walls of our room in the Education building, to the flatscreen TV and the bookshelves that it sits on, to the hauls of PVC piping and glitter paint, to, most expensively, the above-minimum wage paid team of McGill students: it’s all paid for by IOF. When I tell my radical journalist friends that I pay my rent with Imperial Oil money, they arch an eyebrow. I told a chemical engineer friend where my money comes from, and she said, “I’m hoping to get an internship at Imperial Oil this summer.”

The money for the project comes in the form of a commission, and it comes attached to a few, very flimsy, strings. The lab is a five-year project, and should produce at least 15 “blueprints” for science lesson plans.  There is a full-time manager dedicated exclusively to the project – Maggie Weller, my boss. Weller sends the IOF yearly updates, and they send back two thumbs up. They don’t stick their fingers into our work.

WOW Lab was founded by former McGill professor, and science popularizer, Brian Alters. A California native, Alters is an avid Disney fan –―he refers to the student researchers as “imagineers,” and the WOW acronym stands for “Winners of Wonderment.” His method of teaching is over the top: he once taught a lesson to a roomful of elementary students on buoyancy by suiting up in scuba gear, diving into a tank, and having the students predict how much air was required to make him float―a large balloon, a small balloon, or a medium balloon. When critiquing our project ideas, Weller, in this light, often delivers the line, “can you make that more ‘wow?’”

Still, I had some reservations about taking Imperial Oil’s money. “At least it’s not BP, right?” I said to Weller, after Deepwater Horizon happened, after I spent all weekend looking at media coverage of petro soaked birds, while curled up in my apartment with a glass of lemonade and a fan on full blast―– both courtesy of a brought-to-you-by-the-IOF pay check.

“Oh, pet. No oil company is perfect,” Weller replied. “Now, put on the tea kettle?”

This summer, I thought of that Daily article again. The piece quotes heavily from Pascale Tremblay, the then-VP University and Academic Affairs of the Post Graduate Student Society (PGSS). “In an ideal world,” says Tremblay in the article, “we shouldn’t need to have these kinds of huge donations.”

With this in mind, I decided to go into the belly of the beast. I took the elevator to the 15th floor of an office building on Peel, to meet with a man who explained that the “ideal world” Tremblay lays out is never going to happen. And, moreover, that it should never happen. According to Jean-Francois Nadeau, the Director of Corporate Relations at McGill, the university of the future, like that of the present, is one that will work hand-in-hand with corporations. Corporate funding for universities is on the increase – it’s not something that is going to be reversed.

“Corporate funding comes in many flavors,” Nadeau tells me. A company interested in giving to McGill can donate microscopes, services, or a building. They can give a lab a pile of money to work further on a technology or line of research that is interesting to them, or they can work more closely with researchers, drafting up contracts, suggesting ideas, and patenting the outcomes. They give money, in this case, but they also provide knowledge. This type of partnership is most common in the Faculties of Medicine and Engineering, which, by definition, set out to create things for society. It can be beneficial to have a corporation that operates on the front lines of society―and markets real products―talking to these labs. “It’s about having a conversation,” Nadeau says, holding up his hands and then lacing his fingers together. “Without corporations, the current model would not work. We need their money, but we also need their knowledge.”

McGill is not deeply entrenched in the corporate-funded model, but it isn’t entirely free of it, either. About 15 per cent of research funding comes directly from the private sector, which amounts to roughly $54 million. You can see these numbers in a nice little pie chart in one of McGill’s PR pamphlets. If you ask Nadeau for more details, he will decline to give them to you.

I ask Nadeau if he feels frustrated by people who are anti-corporate research. “Frustrated?” he replied. “No.” To him, arguments categorically against our university working hand-in-hand with corporations are misguided, based on the “urban myth that corporations are bad.” The way Nadeau tells it, it’s as simple as explaining to a fifth grader that there aren’t really spider eggs hiding in fast food, waiting for you to take a bite so they can hatch and spawn offspring in your esophagus.

To make an argument wholly in favor of corporate research, however, is to overlook more than just those cases where egregious conflicts of interest have cropped up. In science, conflicts of interest can operate subtly, little mistakes and small decisions can accumulate into a sea change, until, one grant at a time, the whole community is chasing the wrong questions. In “an ideal world,” we might have no conflicts of interest, not just those posed by corporations, but also by government grants, or by the “publish or perish” model of success.

Eric Martin, a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa and researcher at the Quebec think-tank IRIS, is a strict anti-capitalist. He takes a pretty strong stance against all things corporate: “I am totally opposed to any commercial research in universities,” says Martin. To be clear, he is talking about all commercial research: both projects in which a corporation is directly interested in selling the results, and ones in which they hand over money through a foundation, and collect only a tax break and something to put on their public relations website. He is opposed to corporations giving money for buildings on campus. He is opposed to the Second Cup in the library at the University of Ottawa. “We have a Tim’s in our library!” I say. “That is disgusting,” he replied. When I spoke with him, he was on vacation, in a cabin.

I posed a question to Martin: what if a corporate-funded lab at a university is capable of curing cancer? He tells me that’s the kind of a trick question that makes him look like the villain if he says it’s bad. He thinks that kind of research has a place, outside of the university, and that a university can better serve society by being free of monetary influence.

Martin says he’s conservative in a way: he wants to get things back to the way they were. “Historically, the university was a fortress,” says Martin. To him, researchers should not just be separated from the world by an arm’s length, but by a whole fucking moat, and by a whole doctrine of rules and beliefs. “University is no less sacred than the Church.”

There is something in Martin’s radical conservatism that appeals to me: his ideal university is one where research happens in a vaccuum, away from the pressures of society – for curiosity’s sake, for the general happiness of our minds.

Two years ago, wrapping up my first year in the physics major program, I wrote an article that came out of an interview with Denis Rancourt, a former physics professor at the University of Ottawa who was fired for giving an entire senior class A+’s. He called the current system of education a “mind-fuck.” After a year of labs that felt very much like they were designed to mold my brain into that of a drone who studies and listens to instructions, I agreed with him. I applied to the WOW Lab not just because I needed money, but as an expression of this feeling. That little orange room is a haven for me, a pocket of curiosity and wonder.

As I explained an activity called “Polymer Balls” to a 4th grade teacher in July, kneading a wad of hardening liquid, latex, and vinegar into a super-ball shape, he interrupted me: “But how do I evaluate my students on this stuff? They need grades.” Moments like those are frustrating to me –―stop trying to quiz your students, and let them have fun!―– but they also make me feel like we’re on the front lines of something. I am being paid $12 an hour to be creative, a creativity that is going to be channeled for the good of society.

While trying to sort through my feelings about corporate research (and being declined the details of McGill’s policies by Nadeu), I emailed the current PGSS VP University and Academic Affairs, in an attempt to follow up on the 2007 Daily article –―“Is PGSS still looking at McGill policies on corporate partnerships?” I wrote―– and the note was passed along to the VP External, Mariève Isabel, who is investigating the topic. She said she would be happy to talk to me, and she sent me a text message after PGSS council let out that night, asking to meet up. “I’m offering a beer!” the text said.
So I hiked up the hill, and met her outside Thompson House. We sat down with our beer, and she explained that the council had just, that night, September 14, approved her proposal for a working group to look into how McGill is funded by corporations.

Isabel is studying environment and French literature. In 2010, she read a report called Big Oil Goes to College. The report looks at contracts that oil companies have with universities: the terms, the impacts, the loopholes. “It raised the question, how is it going at McGill? The thing is, we don’t really know.”

In August, PGSS hired a part-time researcher to find out, and as of that night, September 14th, they decided to allocate even more financial resources to this project. The researcher will look at the contracts that corporations have at McGill, determine how accessible they are to students, and identify the processes that go into drafting them. Isabel stresses that this research is to be as non-partisan as possible. They are not positioning themselves against corporate research with this decision, she explains: “In a lot of fields, like pharmacy, and engineering, you want to see your research applied. We want to protect fundamental research, research that is lead by curiosity, but we do recognize there is a demand for corporate involvement.”

Along with the work plan for investigating corporate ties, PGSS is also going to hire a researcher to look into the history of McGill as an organization. Isabel thinks that the current view of what a university should be is sometimes too romanticized. She recognizes that it is not only unrealistic, but that a lot of good solutions to problems can come out of labs that collaborate with industry. She just hopes that the trend is one that can be monitored and kept at bay.

In the middle of all this, in a sort-of panic, I emailed Andrew Komar, a masters student in the Faculty of Engineering, who started writing “Prose Encounters of the Nerd Kind” last year when I was Sci+Tech editor. Komar is one of a handful of small bridges between my Daily life and my science life, and sometimes I need someone to join me in the void. I explained the premise of the article in a Facebook message. “We obviously don’t live in a socialist utopia (much as I’d love that),” he replied. We met on lower field.

In his research, Komar is working on building a stronger concrete. He’s not currently funded by a corporation directly, but he’s applying for a fellowship from The American Concrete Association. “It’s going to be helping everybody if you develop a better concrete.”

He knows that there are problems that can come up with conflicts of interest, but those are things to be watched and investigated – not a reason to put a blanket ban on corporate money: “There’s going to be good people who are doing things for the right reasons, there are going to be people who are doing things that are questionable.” That’s going to happen in any situation.

On Komar’s right hand, there is a black wristband that says “Friendly Atheist,” which he explains he won in a blogging contest. On his right pinky, there is an iron ring. “And can you tell me a bit about the iron ring tradition?” I say, slipping back into interview mode.

In Canada, when you earn a bachelor’s degree in engineering, you don’t just walk across a stage and pick up a diploma. There is another ceremony, one that happens in secret, and puts an iron ring on your working hand.

“It is to constantly remind you that you are bound to society. You don’t exist in a vacuum.” Komar might not be into the brouhaha surrounding the ceremony, but he subscribes to the sentiment behind this one.  “We hold ourselves to a standard, ethically,” he explains. “Even if you don’t do anything legally wrong, you can still mess up. You can have your engineering society membership revoked.”

So, where does that leave us, wide-eyed and young and, as so many university students are, politically left? We are going to grow up, and, unless you intend on living in the woods and cutting yourself off from the world, inherit a system in which this is how things work. If they change, if they need to be steered on a course that is more ethical, it will be a subtle and slow process: little ideas and small decisions. This is where to start off: we need to be skeptical. We need to be curious. We need to ask questions.

During the first summer it existed, the employees of the WOW Lab joked about being paid by Imperial Oil, but they tired of the concept by the time I joined the lab in 2010. I don’t recall when I found out our source of funding, but it was sometime during the application process, long before I saw that Daily article.

Recently, I pestered my colleagues for their thoughts on where their paychecks come from, and the consensus boiled down to shrugged shoulders, a general feeling that there was rent that needed to be paid. One of them said, “I think people just hear ‘oil!’ and have this knee jerk reaction, but there is nothing negative going on here.”

Perrin Valli, a former WOW lab employee and now a law student at Queen’s, said that he did have concerns going into the job―that his work would be directly in support of the oil company, influenced by their beliefs―but they evaporated quickly.

“When I proposed a project about renewable energy, I encountered no resistance from Maggie  [Weller] nor from Dr. Alters,” Valli explained in an email. “To the contrary, everyone in the Lab was very excited about the project.”

Valli created a project called “Wind Farm” in which students build windmills out of construction paper and pop bottles. Several of these placed on a desk, hooked together with copper wire, and powered by the moving air from a fan (or, theoretically, real wind) can make a series of LED lights light up. An extended version of the project explains how to make an eight-foot outdoor windmill that can be used to charge an iPod.  The project was sent to Imperial Oil Foundation in one of the lab’s yearly status updates. This past August, a representative from the IOF came to visit McGill to see what we had done with their money. Escorted by the dean of science and the dean of education, she came to visit the WOW Lab. Valli’s prototype had been brought out for display.

The post The oil patch and the ivory tower appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“I’d give a million dollars not to have to pop a pill every day” she says. And she begins telling me about a side of so-called “study drugs” that I had never quite stopped to consider.

The tale of the student who takes ADD/ADHD medication sans prescription is, to the modern day university student, a familiar one. Mythical student Alex (a friend of a friend, or a character in a news story) is a great student, but needs more time for studying, the soccer team, and partying. Alex finds there are meds that improve concentration and keep you up all night. (“Yeah, that’s exactly the type of person who drives me nuts,” says Ellston.)

Alex buys the medication, probably the short-acting Ritalin or Dexodrin, from a friend who has both ADHD and a prescription that provides them with more pills than they need. Alex has a few sweaty, red-eyed nights, but has plans to work at Goldman Sachs and live on Park Avenue. The drug will wash in and out of Alex’s system and leave not a trace.
We know this story by now. If you don’t take concentration meds, you know how to get them, and if you don’t know how to get them, go ask your friends. I’ll bet $5 that you can find a pill in the time it would take you to read this newspaper cover to cover. A recent editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal explains that an estimated 5 to 35 per cent of students abuse prescription stimulants. The editorial is titled “Time to address stimulant abuse on our campuses,” and calls for the de-normalization of their use.  The adults don’t think we’re alright.

But Ellston is not like Alex. During the school year, she takes a pill every day. She’s had a prescription for Concerta – Ritalin’s long-acting cousin – since she was diagnosed with ADHD at 15. “It’s a hardcore drug,” she says. She feels that people who take “study drugs” to try to get ahead in academics don’t understand that. When she goes across the border to the U.S., she can only take so much of the drug – one pill for every day she is traveling – with her and she has to be carrying a doctor’s note. Further, she feels that people taking the medications casually trivializes her illness, which is part of her everyday life.

Concerta, like the other medications commonly used to treat ADD/ADHD – or like caffeine, or cocaine – is a stimulant. That is, it increases the amount of dopamine in the user’s brain. With Concerta, Ellston experiences many of the physiological aspects of an addiction. On days during the school year when she does not take her medication – when she forgets or wakes up after 10 a.m. (if she takes it later than this she cannot fall asleep at night) – she experiences headaches, nausea, and slight depression, much like a cocaine user coming off a high or a coffee addict running too late for work to pop by Starbucks. During the summer, Ellston chooses to go off Concerta, and she has up to a week of nausea and depression. She refers to this period of time as “detox.” “Detox is hell,” she adds. She’s going to start taking Concerta again next week, she tells me, once classes start gearing up: “I’ll basically be high for a couple of days.”

Concerta produces the same effect in people with ADD/ADHD that it does for people without, though the improvement in concentration is more dramatic for people who have a clinically diagnosable difficulty concentrating. Scientists aren’t exactly sure how it works though. The literature is a string of “might”s, and “probably”s. The thinking goes that upping the amount of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain – which ADD/ADHD medication does – improves concentration. People with ADD/ADHD may naturally have less of these neurotransmitters, the conventional wisdom goes, which is probably why taking Concerta can bring them up to the level of concentration that most people experience without the help of drugs.

All stimulants have the effect of improving concentration to some degree. Robert Franck, the Clinical Director of McGill Mental Health Service, says that, more than once, he’s had patients come in with concentration problems that turn out to be ADD/ADHD, and has realized that they have been unconsciously self-medicating by drinking tons of coffee. (“There are lots of reasons people drink coffee,” he says, when I, in a moment of hypochondria, mention that I drink tons of coffee.) Like Ellston, he doesn’t like the fact that students take medication for concentration without a prescription. Though the drugs are relatively safe, they come with a suite of risks and side effects, and their use should be carefully monitored by a health professional – one who knows what other drugs you’re on, too.

Hypertension, arrhythmias, and psychotic episodes are at the extreme end of bad things that can happen from taking ADD/ADHD medication. The CMAJ editorial rattles these off, and adds that, though rare, overdoses are “potentially lethal.” These are all true and valid reasons not to abuse ADD/ADHD medication, explains Franck, “But scare tactics don’t really work.” Further, it’s not just potential physical harm that makes him concerned about medication being used to study. Franck explains that taking drugs as a band-aid solution to, say, anxiety about not being able to complete all your assignments during finals, is to ignore other problems and to potentially mask clinical anxiety or depression. Franck’s motto is, “medication when necessary, but not necessarily medication.”

When Ellston was diagnosed with ADHD – a process of elimination of sorts – the medication was the last step of her treatment plan, and remains just one part of her regimen. In addition to taking the drug, Ellston sees a therapist every week. Through the Office for Students with Disabilities, she’s allowed four hours instead of three to complete exams, and a short break to walk around during an exam. She also gets to bring in a fidgeter – a small object like a koosh ball or a bean bag that she can play with.

She knows her own study habits incredibly well. She doesn’t work on any one assignment for more than half an hour at a time. “The information won’t stick if I try and make myself,” she says. She has a CD-case style binder with 100s of DVDs in her apartment; she loves unwinding in front of the television on Saturdays by watching Harry Potter film after Harry Potter film. “But, see, that takes a lot of concentration. So even when I’m watching movies, which I love, I’m also painting my nails, and checking my email, and texting. I’ll take breaks to just walk around my apartment.”

She describes the feeling of having ADHD like this: it’s like having 100 different thoughts going on in your head at once, popping around and soaring off on their own little orbits. “When I’m on the drugs, instead of 100 thoughts, I only have 50. And when one tries to go off on a tangent,” she says, moving her hand away from her head, “I can feel it being pulled back. It’s like it hits a wall.” It’s not that she’s not herself on the drug, it’s just that her thoughts behave in a different manner. “Being on the drugs is like running down a hallway, and not being on them is like running through a field.”

It’s odd, but the fact that these are prescription drugs with a medical use hadn’t quite settled in my mind before now. Perhaps it’s because of stories that have been popping up in the media over the past few years – each taking the tack that study drug abuse, like hooking up, smoking pot, or using the internet, is a new trend hitting the continent’s youth. Perhaps it’s because I went to a high school filled with overachievers who went on to universities that boasted as much of a problem with ADD/ADHD medication abuse as they did with any other drug. Though I’ve never taken Ritalin or Concerta, it’s never occurred to me that I should have any qualms about doing so – not even the basic concerns that come with smoking pot now and then. It’s not even treated like a recreational drug in the crowd I run with. It’s not done for fun – it’s done to achieve.

According to Alan Desantis at the University of Kentucky, I’m not alone. He’s spent the past handful of years facilitating interviews with hundreds of students, and has found that, for some, taking the medication sans prescription was less of a concern than drinking beer or smoking cigarettes. For some, ADD/ADHD medication doesn’t carry the same weight as party drugs. In his research he found that students use a number of arguments to justify their lax use of the medication, including that they only take it during finals, that they are self-medicating for concentration problems, and what Desantis refers to as the “I’m-doing-it-for-the-right-reasons” argument.

“No, they’re definitely a drug!” says George Bellwood*, a McGill student without ADHD who took Concerta about eight times last year. “Yes, eight, I think. I’m thinking about this in terms of the number of major assignments,” he says, counting on his fingers.

For Bellwood – who has also done cocaine, pot, and MDMA – the study drugs are a tool to be used during long nights of working that come free of particular health or moral concerns. Scare tactics referencing potential death do not work on him.
Concerta is long release, so it allows Bellwood to work overnight. He’ll drink two or three cups of coffee in the evening, settle into the Arts computer lab, and get to work on a paper. Around two a.m., when the coffee stops being enough, he’ll pop a pill. The metallic taste of the Concerta hits his tounge, and will stay there in his mouth for a while (“like licking iron,” he says). He’ll feel jittery, sweaty. His mind will feel clear, he explains, making a desk-clearing gesture with his hands. And then he’ll work.

He dispels my notion that these drugs offer a sort of trance. “Is it like kicking a soccer ball around for hours? That kind of focused?” I ask.
“Oh God no. You don’t lose track of time. You’re really aware of the next step.” He drums the table with his index fingers. “And you don’t want to be doing the work. You just are.”

He’ll continue in that robotic haze, one task, and then the next, and then the next. By four a.m., there are only two or three other students left, at least one of them asleep. “It’s so fucking bleak in that room, with those fluorescent lights.” The janitor comes in at seven, signaling that the rest of the world has moved onto the next day.

Bellwood plans on going to grad school when he’s done at McGill – he explains that for his field, history, he has to. (George also asked that his real major not be used). His normal facial expression is a sort of cheshire-cat grin, which makes him seem at once eager and carefree. He talks about history – citing paradigms and scholars – the way other people talk about TV shows. Last semester he got a 4.0, started a journal, edited a section of a campus newspaper, had a part-time job, and, though he insists his social life was cut in half, still went out every Saturday or so. “What, how to you do all that?” I ask him. “The drugs!” he says, his hands flying into the air. What is it that I thought I was interviewing him about?
The drugs are a prop he hopes he will cast aside when he’s finished hopping along the stepping stones to a successful future. But he can’t say when that will be. “When you’re in grad school? When you’re working an entry-level position?” He’s not sure, he just sort of knows that there will be a time in the future when the work will pay off, a spot in life where the things on his to-do list can be accomplished without him breaking out in a chemically induced sweat, accomplished with room left over for seven hours of sleep and a substantial social life.

Sitting in Franck’s office, I outlined Bellwood’s reasoning: wanting to go to grad school, wanting grades and extracurriculars to be a tangible currency he can exchange for a job after graduation, and knowing meds can help a person do more and do better. Shouldn’t we take a leg up in the world when we can? (In fact, this was before I first talked to Bellwood – these concerns are near-universal amongst a certain kind of high-achieving McGill student.)

“I would say, to those people, why do you feel you have to study so hard?”  Franck said. Wanting to get ahead in life does not necessitate medication – you can be organized and reasonable about what you take on. But it’s not just that: Franck thinks doing drugs to wend one’s way through undergrad amounts to cheating yourself out of the things that you actually enjoy in life. These are the things – whether coding, reading, playing soccer – at which you might end up being successful, the activities you love so much you can sit and do them for hours and lose track of time.

“That, that is the kind of attitude that I fucking hate,” says Bellwood, when I bring up Franck’s argument. “It’s actually really harmful, that kind of faux naïveté. ‘Why are you studying so hard?!’ Theoretically, this is the point of attending a university.”

This brings up a much larger reality about education, especially at a school like McGill: that it’s a dream world, of sorts, a strange pocket of society filled with bright people, 24-hour study facilities, 24-hour coffee shops, and an endless tunnel of hoops to jump through. There are small, flickering lights dotting the tunnel – if I can just pass this midterm, just make it through finals, just get my diploma – that make it seem like ad hoc solutions, like one more all-nighter, or two, or eight, could be enough. We’re judged by our peers, by the numbers that stare back at us from our transcripts, by the test score requirements on grad school information pamphlets. Perhaps most importantly, for Bellwood and for many of us, we’re here because of reasons that are genuine and innocent: because we love academia, because we want to grow up and be happy and prosperous. Doing well in academia can bring us those things, and drinking coffee and popping pills can bring us success in academia. It seems like such a simple transaction, like magic.

But, to Franck, to the adults, you have to learn to live within the constraints of the real world. Franck explains “university is a wonderful opportunity to develop understanding – not just academic, but how to feel good about yourself, how to manage time, and to develop coping strategies.”  By popping study drugs, Franck believes, you set yourself up in a lifestyle that is unsustainable and potentially soul-sucking, one that’s not based on doing the things that make you happy, but on the things that you feel society – or the job market, or your parents, or your peers – want out of you. Still, he sympathizes with the plight of the George Bellwoods of the world. He knows the heat of the floodlights turned on students these days. That’s why he thinks people like him – adults, and MDs – need to work harder to educate students about the perils of study drugs, and about ways to cope without the drugs.

Ellston agrees. She’s studying high school education. When on field experience (a sort of mandatory internship for education students), she’ll often have a child or two in her classroom with ADHD. She feels she can effectively teach these kids in a way that teachers without ADHD can’t. “They’ll do things like stand up in the middle of class and start walking around, and their teacher will say, ‘no, no, sit down,’” she explains. Instead of becoming frusturated and disciplining them, or singling them out, Ellston can empathize: “I’ll talk to them about it, and say, ‘if you need to stand up during class, stand up. I need to do that too sometimes.’”

She wants to teach for a few years, and then go into educational policy, where she will design curriculums, and play with the way the classroom is structured, making it a more friendly place for kids who have different learning styles, whether they are diagnosed with a disorder or not. She loves being able to do that.

*Names have been changed.

The post Getting by or getting high appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The McGill Daily: Is the presence of conflicts of interest in these studies something that’s of concern in the research world?

Michelle Roseman: It wasn’t on the minds of the authors of the meta-analyses. We sent an email to survey the authors of the meta-analyses that we included: we asked whether or not they had extracted this information as part of their protocol – regardless of whether or not they ended up publishing it. Most said that they thought that was a great idea, but they hadn’t thought of it.

MD: How did you decide to do this particular study?

MR: My supervisor was looking to do a meta-analysis, and he was in contact with one of the major journals, and was discussing whether or not they would be interested in this. In their discussions, the journal said, “Actually, too many of the studies that you would want to include are industry-funded.” This prompted him to want to study this systematically. I was a research assistant in his lab at the time – he discussed the project with me, and it sounded really interesting. I became a grad student in the lab and continued to work on it as my thesis project.

MD: What are you hoping people who read your study will take away from it?

MR: We’re hoping that researchers will start including the funding sources of the individual trials. There are guidelines that already exist on how to write up a meta-analysis, called the Prisma guidelines –  the standard in the industry on what information should [be] included in a meta-analysis. What we suggested is that these guidelines need to be updated.

MD: How might this change the way physicians operate?

MR: In many cases, there might only be industry-funded studies of a drug – the industry currently funds about 70 per cent of the clinical trials that occur. But certain meta-analyses could be looked at with a more critical eye.

– Compiled by Shannon Palus

The post The investigation of conflicts of interest appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The makers of Sinclair ZX80 promise that “you don’t have to wait for the future.” Though the copy lists math lessons and creating home budgets among its uses, it’s marketed as more of a plaything, a fun experiment, than a tool: “take a trip to the computer age now.” It cost just shy of $200, and came with a guide and a ten-day money-back guarantee – and the promise that “in one day you’ll be writing your own programs!”

Atari Home Computers: A girl with a clear space-helmet sits next to her dog, as she plays a game called, “Caverns of Mars.” The caption reads, “Learn to Brave New Worlds.”

Apple II: Even in the early days, Apple ads featured a clean design and timeless copy. One ad featured a red apple on a white background, below the words, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

“By the year 2000, the world may catch up with the way CompuServe’s new electronic mall let’s you shop today.” The ad promises at-home shopping: customers could call up descriptions of products, view catalogues, and place orders. A “unique ‘feedback’ service” was available to ask merchants questions, and electronic bulletin boards – mostly run by amateurs – were also gaining popularity.

In a two-page IBM ad spread, Charlie Chaplin rides a bicycle with a large tan case neatly strapped to the rear wheel. The large copy reads, “How to move with modern times and take your PC with you.” The fine print includes: “It’s a PC. In a case. With a handle.” IBM ran many ads with the words “modern times” accompanying Chaplin’s image – perhaps in ironic conflict with the 1936 movie Modern Times, where Chaplin plays Little Tramp, a character struggling to fit into a world which relies increasingly on technology and industry.

The post Visions of the future appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“When Sesame Street does a segment, they bring in little children to watch it. If the children start wiggling before 17 seconds, they cut the segment,” explained Shirley Steinberg, co-founder of the McGill-based Freire Project. “Seventeen seconds. That’s what Sesame Street sees as a rational time for kids to give their attention. That tells me as a teacher, I have to be good.”

But what qualities makes a good teacher, and a good lesson? And how do you put those qualities into a classroom – whether it’s a room of kindergartners jaded by too much television or an introductory science lecture in Leacock 132?

Steinberg’s role is to work with teachers: to talk to them about media literacy and critical pedagogy, the philosophy on which the Freire Project is founded. She described the project as a global network of grassroots educators who question the standard curriculum: “Is this enough, should we have more?”

Where do politics fit in?

I had arranged to talk to Steinberg via Skype – though she is based at McGill, she was in Spain when I contacted her collaborating with a group at the University of Barcelona. I hit the call button, and moments later I found myself facing Steinberg in her hotel room; I half-heartedly apologized for the fact that I was sitting in my room in a hoodie, my hair caked with grease. Steinberg’s red hair was pulled back into hundreds of tiny braids; she had two coloured rubber bracelets on her wrist. One reads “The Freire Project: Radical Love,” and the other is for Joe Kincheloe, the late co-founder of the project.

I have notes scrawled on a single piece of scratch paper – the back of electronics lab instructions – which represent the sum -total of knowledge I have on critical pedagogy. Steinberg was surprised that I was even familiar with the term. I explain I picked up the article pitch because after interviewing Denis Rancourt, former Ottawa physics professor who was fired in the spring of 2009 for giving a senior class all A-pluses, I have been curious as to how education can be restructured. How could science class go beyond the carrot-and-stick grading system, beyond professors who seem too wrapped up in research to freshen up their class notes from year to year?

Dismantling and reconstructing

Quebec has a secondary curriculum that won’t fit into a standard-sized binder. The curriculum consists of pages and pages of what topics teachers need to cover, and in what year students should learn what skills.

Critical pedagogy is in essence the opposite of the heavy and formal provincial outline. Pedagogy is the science of teaching – but critical pedagogy is not a method, not something which can be imposed or memorized. Furthermore, it’s not a one-size-fits-everyone-who-lives-in-the-same-boundaries-on-a-map mandate.

“You teach rich kids differently from how you teach poor kids. You just do. If you don’t, you’re a liar, as a teacher,” said Steinberg.

Critical pedagogy hangs on the idea that teaching happens within a social context, within a political context. Teaching may fall into power balances between students and teachers – this ought to be realized and fixed; and it has the power to examine power imbalances that students face in their own communities. Teachers need to understand where their students are coming from and incorporate this into the classroom.

“If I were trying to work with you – and in fact, I probably will do it before the interview is over – but since your area is science, instead of talking to you about my area, I would try to bring science into it, and discuss it from your point of view… It’s about, number one, contextualizing – nothing is learned in a vacuum,” she explained.

I think of the problems in an introductory mechanics class: massless pulleys, frictionless slopes, no air resistance – imaginary systems sheltered from even the slightest draft. But sometimes I like that politics – oppression, gender – have no business in the very fundamental laws of the universe. It makes physics class simple.

“Shannon, you are killing me here,” wrote Steinberg, when we were discussing the issue later in an email exchange. “How can politics and oppression be ignored in science? The rainforest? And in gender – the issue of females in science?”

Oppressed peoples and old ways

In the late 1960s, political activist Paulo Freire was teaching farm workers in Recife, Brazil how to read. He concluded that traditional education – the mere relaying of skills and facts – was not enough to get students out of poverty.

“He realized they had to learn how to name their own oppression, that people had to understand that they are oppressed, and most oppressed people do not know that they are oppressed,” explained Steinberg. In the interest of correctly naming oppression, she avoids terms like “socially-economically deprived kids.”  She explained later in an email that politically correct terms propagate a dangerous viewpoint: “Those in power do not want oppressed people emancipated”.

Henry Giroux – ”the modern father of critical pedagogy,” Steinberg called him – brought the critical pedagogy philosophy into a North American context. And now, decades after Freire invented the concept, critical pedagogy is applied to a context in which mass communication flourishes.

“We are a media world. We are TV, we are computer, we are internet, we are digital,” said Steinberg. “People have relationships this way. The entire world is now cyber,” she continued.

One of the centre’s recent projects is working with the Maison des Jeunes community center in Côte-des-Neiges, with whom they sponsored a conference last March on hip hop – how to use hip hop in the classroom toward media literacy. The centre has also done work with the Cree community on self-identity, and how First Nations people are portrayed in the media.

Staying sharp

Steinberg discussed how if she were teaching middle-school girls how to write an essay, she would ask them to write it about a topic like Miley Cyrus – to examine the marketing forces, do research on Disney, and on the depiction of teenage girls in the media.

“So how would you teach middle-school kids science?” I asked.

“Science has become consumerized, so much. Even something simple like ecology – saving the world – has now been corporatized,” she said. “In a science class – maybe if we’re talking about chemicals, along with teaching about chemicals, I would teach about chemical spills, and about social responsibility, about how that conversation happens.”

Critical pedagogy teachers should be scholarly, updated, the same way that dentists have to learn about new techniques for x-raying teeth, Steinberg explained.

“Professionals need to be constantly re-professionalizing,” she explained. “If someone is lecturing me with yellow notes that are falling apart, I think that person needs to stop lecturing.”

I tell Steinberg about a physics class last year where we used a textbook that had to be ordered in copied course-pack form because it was out of print. Our edition was from 1986.

“Students should just, en masse, drop the class. And make sure you always put out teacher evaluations. But you know, it’s just wrong. It’s wrong,” she offered. “Do we lose our souls just to get a class taught? I don’t think so.”

But as a student – as someone who is potentially marginalized, as someone with course requirements and tuition and a degree to earn – critical pedagogy does not seem to offer much of a solution. Changing the system – whether the goal is to get students out of poverty, or get them to do more creative physics – is still in the hands of  those in power. It doesn’t look like there is much support for departing from the standard curriculum. Rancourt didn’t have U of Ottawa’s support when he tried to remove the grading system. Steinberg emphasized that the current dean of the Faculty of Education does not support the Freire Project.

As for keeping students interested? During our conversation, Steinberg brought up a concept that didn’t require fancy textbook packaging, TV gimmicks, or even a well-researched philosophy: “If all teachers loved their jobs, they’d probably have better students.”

The post Re-contextualizing the classroom appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The now-yellow front pages of that copy overflow with praise from newspapers. The story has been used in middle school classrooms across America to teach new generations about the boy who built rockets and left his life in small-town 1950s West Virginia – along with his imminent future as a coal miner – to grow up and study aerospace engineering. The book, and Hickam’s two sequel memoirs, The Coalwood Way, and Sky of Stone, made their way through my bedtime reading circuit as a child.

Hickam has long since left his job as a NASA engineer, and is now a full-time writer. For a few weeks every summer, he’s also an amateur paleontologist: eleven years ago the director of October Sky movie, Joe Johnston, was going on a dig with paleontologist John R. “Jack” Horner, to do research for Jurassic Park 3. Hickam asked to come along.

“It’s like an easter egg hunt every day, you’re out there looking for something that nobody’s seen for 65 million or more years,” said Hickam of hunting for dinosaurs.

Hickam’s latest book, a novel titled The Dinosaur Hunter, will be released on November 9.

Hickam’s PR person emailed me a PDF file of the advance copy. For a week in October, I escaped to the fictional Square C in Filmore, Montana, between classes, and in breaks from working on problem sets. The story is told from the perspective of Mike, a vegetarian detective-turned-cowboy looking back a year later on events that took place on the ranch: the arrival of a paleontologist named Pick, and the drama over bones found on the ranch.

Tensions between science and money run high. At the beginning of the book, Pick insists on using any discovered bones for finding “truth through science.” Ranch owner Jeanette replies, “Does truth through science pay your bills?” and then asks how much dinosaur bones might be worth.

As bones are meticulously uncovered by Pick and his two female assistants with help from Mike and a few other ranchers, their value – both monetary and scientific – becomes more apparent. One of the ranch’s cows is found murdered, and then another. Machine guns make a short appearance in the final act.

When Hickam was an undergrad at Virginia Tech, he wrote a column for the newspaper about the cadet corp. He’s written a series of historical fiction novels, and magazine articles about scuba diving. Other claims to fame include a cannon named Skipper that he built when he was at university (Skipper 3 is still fired at Virginia Tech football games today), and going on CNN to comment on the Chilean miners. According to his Facebook page, these days he is in “full Dinosaur-Hunter-marketing mode” (“A special gift idea!” says a button on his website that links to instructions on pre-ordering an autographed copy). Hickam wrote on his blog that this might be a breakout novel for him.

“But, you’re already famous,” I said, during a phone interview to his home in Alabama.

He laughed, and I was certain that I had outed myself as a stranger to the commercial fiction publishing world. He explained that he’s exploring two new genres: the book is both a Western and a mystery – both huge markets for selling books.

“Publishers actually hate what I do,” said Hickam, and added that if it were up to the publishers, he would just be writing different versions of the Rocket Boys story.

He hopes that the book will be a breakout in the market for mystery books, and then sell and be optioned for a movie. He’d like to write a series following the protagonist, Mike.

There are a handful of little details in The Dinosaur Hunter that are lovely. To tell if a tan pebble is a bone, Pick conducts a “field test” by placing it on his tongue to feel the texture – something that I was taught to do while interning at an archaeology lab in high school. The characters muse about what Pick refers to as “deep time,” 65 to 300 million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the land and Square C was a figment of the distant future. There’s question of whether or not animals have feelings; the paleontologists tell campfire-side stories about a mother T-Rex fighting for her children in the name of love. A teenage girl on the ranch, Amelia, sees paleontology as a way out of Filmore – the same way that a young Hickam felt that rockets were a way out of Coalwood.

But Mike lacks a deeper curiosity for bones beyond what he’s directly exposed to. He quotes the facts he learned directly from the sources – like explanations of the occipital condyle of an adult Triceratops, and radiogenic dating methods – instead of working them into the narrative. It’s a clumsy way to offer exposition, and poor science writing.

The Dinosaur Hunter lacks the meticulous embroidery of interesting ideas that was present in Rocket Boys such as the opening paragraph of which mentions heartbreak, thermodynamics, and the future of the children living in a small mining town. It was hailed as one of the best openings to a memoir. The rest of the book follows in a similar suit: every page is interesting in and of itself, and the book as a whole is enough to alter a pre-teen’s path in life, or at least, my pre-teen self: after closing the final chapter of Hickam’s memoir series, a set of Estes model rockets wound up under the Christmas tree, I dreamt of, then abandoned the idea of becoming an astronaut and started studying physics.

One review of The Dinosaur Hunter, from Kirkus Book Reviews is especially positive. Hickam has copy-pasted the review to his blog, and dubbed the folks at Kirkus “true dino boys and girls.” Hickam seems eager to share his dreams – toward the end of our interview he asked me, “Are you going to go out and hunt dinosaurs?”

Hickam asked me what I thought of the book, and I explained that I thought it is a good story, and it is – the whole novel goes down easily, like a good bedtime story – but a little light on the science for my liking.

“For a popular writer – and I fall into that category – to write a book primarily about science, you’re running a rather huge risk,” he explained.

He said he hopes that readers might gain an appreciation for paleontology, and even learn a bit about the work that goes into digging up a dinosaur. The book gives the reader a beginner’s perspective of fossils. Mike’s perspective is in many ways Hickam’s perspective when he goes on digs with Horner – ears open, and eyes wide.

Hickam explained that, especially after watching October Sky, people often view him as a scientist – which of course, as a former engineer, has never been an accurate descriptor. This isn’t a bad thing when one is releasing a book with science themes. “It’s all a matter of marketing,” he explained
Hickam does not consider himself to be a science writer. My vision of picking his brain for tricks of the science writing trade, commiserating about the specific twinges of loneliness that come with balancing an existence between the likes of the physics lounge and the Daily office, fell through at this point in our interview. I suppose I should have known: aside from the Rocket Boys trilogy, outer space has shown up in just two of his other works.

Hickam stresses that, despite what the October Sky movie might indicate, he’s a writer for a living.

He chuckled, “I am the most misunderstood writer in the world.”

The post Full-time novelist appeared first on The McGill Daily.

It was halfway through the Fall 2009 semester – I was working on a linear algebra problem set with a few classmates and no, I hadn’t heard of Paul’s Online Math notes.

By the time finals rolled around, the $70 paperback textbook I had purchased for the course had taken up permanent residence under a pile of dirty laundry. I was whipping through problems involving the likes of eigenvalues with the website open in upwards of ten tabs on my Firefox browser.

Paul Dawkins is an associate math professor at Lamar University, in Beaumont, Texas. He has undergraduate and masters degrees in Mechanical Engineering. When he finished grad school, he was offered a job as a math professor, and he’s been teaching ever since.

He explained that he started the website in 2003 as a place to post notes for his differential equations class when the price of the textbook that he was planning on assigning increased by $50 with no notable improvement in content. The site has since expanded to include math notes from linear algebra to multivariable calculus.

The site has gotten 3.3 million unique hits already this year, which, as the website wraps up its seventh year of existence, have been unexpected. “I thought I would be lucky if even a couple of my students accessed it, to be honest,” said Dawkins.

Despite his modesty, Dawkins’s profile on ratemyprofessors.com includes pages of comments from students that he’s never taught.

“His online notes are better and more useful than the actual class with an actual professor that I am taking at a different school,” said one commenter in July 2010.

The prose on the website is clean, there are as many example problems as there are words, and the first person plural is ubiquitous. “Let’s” try this, and “we” do that. We’re a team, we are looking at these triple integrals, working through these Jacobean determinants together.

Though Dawkins is aware of this quality, like everything else about the website – its success, its simple design, and even the teaching career that launched it into being – it isn’t exactly intentional. He said he’s got theories about the appeal of his writing style, and why students seem to like it: mostly that it departs from the traditional, rigorous style of math pedagogy.

The website is free of gratuitously fancy vocabulary. As Will Liu, a U3 Electrical Engineering student, put it, “He doesn’t phrase his shit in that pretentious math jargon.”

Dawkins said that he’ll never write a textbook. “That means dealing with the very people I set out to avoid,” he explained.

There are also no ads on the site. “I have no interest in making money off it, which I suppose sounds weird, but I don’t,” Dawkins insisted.

But one can make a living from running a successful math website. Elizabeth Stapel’s Purple Math offers math lessons in pre-algebra through basic calculus; the small side bar ads for math books from Amazon, widgets that advertise for a software called Mathway, and an online tutoring service offered through the site serve as Stapel’s primary form of income. Stapel hosts the site herself, while Dawkins runs his off of Lamar’s server, and unlike Dawkins, she doesn’t currently have a paycheck coming in from a university.

I asked Stapel if she’d ever consider publishing a textbook. She emailed me an animation showing how to multiply two matrices: a hand pointing to each pair of numbers on the left side of the equal sign, and then the product in the appropriate spot on the right. “How would this be presented in a static textbook?” she wrote, also citing the ability to hyperlink pages as a reason she favours web over text.

But the problem with transferring one’s vision to a hard-copy educational material goes deeper than widgets and linking abilities – neither of which Dawkins uses much on his site (in fact, he actually offers free ebook PDFs of the web text). Stapel explained that it would be difficult to approach a textbook publishing company with a website, and be received with enthusiasm for preserving the style. According to Stapel, the process works the other way around: “[Publishers] write up proposals and outlines, and then they hire the writers.”

Editing web content offers another advantage over textbooks, which remain static until they’re re-released as a new, more expensive, edition. “The material is under continual review and improvement,” explained Stapel. Neither Dawkins nor Stapel has an official proof reader.

“So you follow more of an open source mentality, that you have so many readers and if there’s a mistake –,” I began to ask Dawkins. “Somebody will let me know, and somebody does,” he finished.

This model of free internet material departs from the traditional rigour that goes into material put out by universities. It isn’t fact-checked, copy-edited, or formally cleaned up. The notes aren’t peer reviewed. The notes aren’t bringing in grant dollars. The notes are an organized explanation of university- level math, not original research that can be printed in a journal.

“I don’t know how familiar you are with the politics up there [at McGill], but I’m sure they’re the same as down here. It’s really a situation of publish or perish,” explained Dawkins.

Nonetheless, he doesn’t spend time doing research – search his name in Google Scholar and the sole hit is a paper on eigenvalues from 1998. “I suspect some look at it like, ‘it’s just some idiot trying to avoid publishing,’” he mused.

The accessibility of the notes, the small handful of emails he gets every day, the barrage of thank yous that roll into his inbox around finals season, aren’t a currency that the university can necessarily value. “I will admit I’ve not gotten too far up the chain,” he explained.

“[Tenure] is part of how I can get away with working on this, to be honest with you. I’ve got tenure, so they can’t tell me I should be doing other things,” he noted.

Dawkins nonetheless loves teaching, although he can’t say quite why. At Lamar, he spends his time holding open office hours, dealing with the recent increase in class sizes, and keeping up his online math notes.

The post Minus pretentious jargon appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Along with an international group of scientists, Strong submitted a proposal to NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) for an instrument they had developed to be on board the Mars Trace Gas Orbiter (MTGO). MTGO is the first step in the ExoMars mission, a NASA and ESA collaboration. Early in August, it was announced that the instrument Strong and her team created – the Mars Atmospheric Trace Molecule Occultation Spectrometer (MATMOS) – was among the five chosen, out of 19 proposals.

The resulting press is splashy: “Searching for life on Mars,” reads the headline from InsideToronto.com. “MATMOS will probe the red planet’s atmosphere for biological sources of methane,” says a line in the Globe and Mail.

But the coverage is misleading: MATMOS – which will not land on Mars –is not in search of organisms themselves. Martian life, if it exists, would likely be anaerobic microbes (which survive in the absence of oxygen) that take refuge underground from the planet’s harsh surface. Not little green men, not intelligent beings – and not something flying around in the atmosphere where MATMOS could crash into it.

MATMOS will collect data on methane, first discovered on Mars in 2003, by looking through the atmosphere at sunrise and sunset as it orbits the planet. The methane in the Martian atmosphere might be a biosignature – a phenomenon produced by something living. Or it might exist in patterns that indicate a geological origin.

I called Strong while she was in Australia, working on a project to measure carbon dioxide in the Arctic in collaboration with a few of her MATMOS team members.

“It all kind of ties together,” Strong said of her work as a whole. Her graduate work dealt with Jupiter’s atmosphere, so she’s excited to be doing planetary research again.

I asked her what the most exciting find of the MATMOS data could be.

“It would be absolutely amazing if we had conclusive evidence that the methane was coming from a biological source,” she said.

Definitive evidence of life on Mars?
“Yes, that would be the point of the mission.”

Later, in a phone conversation with Jorge Vago, an ExoMars scientist from ESA who spoke to me from his office in the Netherlands. I asked about the methane evidence. Could it be conclusive of Martian life?
Vago was cautious: “Look. ‘Conclusive’ is a very tall word. Conclusive is in the eye of the beholder.” He explained that if the data from the orbiter were to indicate a biological source, there would be several steps and missions that would need to follow to confirm what was found.

“If anything, I hope the mission will be able to find results that point to a possible life origin, if we are lucky, and then people will be fighting over this for a number of years. And slowly, some sort of consensus may emerge,” said Vago.

Like many frontiers of science these days, looking for signs of life has encouraged cooperation among Earth’s own inhabitants. While the early days of space travel, from Sputnik to the race for the moon, pitted nations against each other, national space agencies are now looking to reach milestones together.

“We have finite resources,” said Strong, referring to the space exploration community as a whole. “These are challenging missions. The more we can work together, the better it is, really.”

ESA and NASA, once sending separate missions to Mars, are now sharing their resources for the joint ExoMars mission. The mission’s MGTO segment is slated for launch in 2016 and another component involving a pair of rovers is slated for 2018.

Other organizations will contribute smaller technological components. A large portion of MATMOS, including key pieces of the instrument’s hardware, is contracted to the engineering company ABB Bomem of Quebec City and will be funded by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Paying for space exploration is expensive, but Canada’s bill for MATMOS is, as Strong said, “peanuts compared to the G20.”

“All this space exploration, you should look at it a bit as a long-term investment on the future of human kind,” Vago said.

Vago thinks the justification for the cost is clearer for the ExoMars mission than for others. A mission geared toward looking for signs of life, Vago explains, could have practical implications for geology. Finding life on Mars would be helpful in understanding the origins of life on our own planet. Mars is pristine: there are no tectonic plates folding rocks back into a molten core and erasing the planet’s historical record – essential information about the genesis of life.

Last Thursday, I sat down with Hojatollah Vali in his office at McGill, and talked about the possibility of life on Mars and space travel. Vali is an associate professor who studies bacteria and teaches an astrobiology course in the winter semester.

He elaborated on the implications of finding life on Mars, suggesting that examining life on Mars would also help tell us if life has universal components. Did life evolve uniquely on Earth, or is it the cousin of life elsewhere?
I asked him why we should put money into planetary studies, why it’s in a nation’s interest to spend money to go and explore and figure these things out. He laughed, “I struggle with this.”

He paused, and leaned back in his chair. “Can we justify airplanes that go and kill people? Whatever we learn [on Mars] will make us a better people, instead of going to destroy things.”

Funding is still an issue for space exploration. The sample return mission scheduled for ExoMars in the 2020s is the kind of thing that keeps getting pushed back.

Sample return is one more step toward, someday, sending astronauts. Scientists like Strong and her team can do much of their work remotely with satellites, but a manned mission still holds a certain kind of wonder, a “let’s see if we can do this” appeal.

Vali mused that if we look at humans as the long-term goal, there are practical applications to be seen in a crewed Mars mission. In the distant future, civilization could expand to Mars and beyond. If Earth no longer suited or supported human life, we wouldn’t have to downsize. We could go other places – to other planets.

As my conversation with Vali wrapped up, I offered my line about how much things have changed since the space race and express my support of space agencies’ widespread cooperation. He looked unenthused. He said the CSA contributes to NASA projects because their budget is too small for the organization to operate solo. He’s disappointed that CSA is stuck footing the bill for construction of instruments for other organizations’ projects – like the robotic arm they built for the International Space Station, a laser for NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander, and now MATMOS for ExoMars. In not conducting their own, independent experiments, they’re shying away from pure science.

“Their mandate is really technology,” said Vali. “I hope we could spend more on research.”

The post Martian microbes, maybe appeared first on The McGill Daily.