Contest asks students to quit or not start smoking

Stacey Goyan

News Editor

This Tuesday, Leave the Pack Behind kicked off its ‘Would you rather?’ anti-smoking contest on the Lakehead campus. The contest hopes to convince students to quit smoking, as well as to deter non-smokers from starting.

Leave the Pack Behind is a campus anti-smoking group operated mostly by students. The program operates on various campuses across Ontario.

Students who attended the kick off event were able to sign up for the ‘Would you rather’ contest, which rewards students who quit, cutback, or don’t start.

Students could enroll in four different categories; one for students ready to quit for good, another for students willing to cutback by 50%, a third for students who commit to not smoking while drinking, and a final one for non-smokers who agree to not start.

The contest was open to smokers, non-smokers, and ex-smokers. Campus program coordinator Kayla Berst estimated roughly 100 students signed up for the contest.

According to Berst, university students are particularly at risk for developing smoking habits.

“That age of 18-24 is the highest age of smokers and people starting smoking.”

Berst said support was available to students participating in the form of a buddy system, as well as check-ups via email.

The event also provided students with free grub, access to health care professionals, and a blood typing clinic. As well, an inflatable jousting station was set up so students could knock out “Big Cigg,” the program’s mascot.

The contest offered students cash prizes, gift certificates, and gym memberships as a reward for healthy living. The contest is six weeks long, with tentative events taking place throughout.

Berst noted cutbacks in spending on anti-smoking programs and their affects on resources, including peer leaders.

“Essentially there’s 650 students [who] lost out on jobs,” said Berst.

Despite this, Berst said the group has been active in maintaining monthly programs on campus.

The groups funding comes from the Ministry of Health and operates on both the Lakehead University and Confederation College campuses.

New research reveals how the brain arranges noun representations

Anthony Marrelli

Argus

In the 19^th century, the discovery of the Rosetta Stone was used to understand the ancient Egyptian scrolls. Presently, a team of Carnegie Mellon University scientists have discovered the beginning of the neural Rosetta Stone.

Utilizing unique brain imaging and machine learning techniques, neuroscientists Marcel Just and Vladimir Cherkassky, and computer scientists Tom Mitchell and Sandesh Aryal determined how the brain arranges noun representations.

Just, a professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging says they have “discovered how the brain’s dictionary is organized”.

As the researchers report, the three codes or factors that concern the development of basic human fundamental representation include how you physically interact with the object, how it is related to eating, and how it relates to shelter.

“It isn’t alphabetical or ordered by the sizes of objects or their colors. It’s through the three basic features that the brain uses to define common nouns like apartment, hammer and carrot,” says Just.

In the case of an item such as a hammer, the motor cortex was the brain area activated to code the physical interaction. “To the brain, a key part of the meaning of hammer is how you hold it, and it is the sensory-motor cortex that represents ‘hammer holding,’” said Cherkassky.

The research also showed that the noun meanings were coded similarly in all of the participants’ brains.

“This result demonstrates that when two people think about the word ‘hammer’ or ‘house,’ their brain activation patterns are very similar. But beyond that, our results show that these three discovered brain codes capture key building blocks also shared across people,” said Mitchell.

This study marked the first time thoughts stimulated by words alone were accurately identified using brain imaging, in contrast to earlier studies that used picture stimuli or pictures together with words.

The programs were able to identify the thought without benefit of a picture representation in the visual area of the brain, focusing instead on the semantic or conceptual representation of the objects.

Additionally, the team was able to predict where the activation would be for a previously unseen noun. A computer program assigned a score to each word for each of the three dimensions, and that score predicted how much brain activation there would be in each of 12 specified brain locations.

The theory generated a prediction of the activation for apartment based only on the patterns derived from the other 59 words.

To test the theory, the team used the word scores to identify which word a participant was thinking about, just by analyzing the person’s brain activation patterns.

The program was able to tell which of the 60 words a participant was thinking about, with an accuracy as high as 84 percent for two of the participants, and an average accuracy of 72 percent across all 10 participants.

The three factors, each coded in three to five different locations in the brain, were found by a computer algorithm that searched for commonalities among brain areas in how participants responded to 60 different nouns describing physical objects.

With psychiatric and neurological illnesses, the meanings of certain concepts are sometimes distorted,” Just said.

Another implication is in developing and testing domain expertise at the neural level. “We teach to the mind but we are shaping the brain, and now we can give the brain a test of how well it has learned a concept,” says Just.

The research can be found in the January 12^th issue of the journal PLoS On, which is available open source and available at: http://www.plosone.org/home.action.

Photo by Cole Breiland

As Ontario job markets decline, international recruiters hope to draw Canadian educators

Whitney Bourgouin

With over 700 education students expected to graduate from Lakehead University’s Thunder Bay campus, this spring will see many new teachers looking for jobs.

To help with their job search, Lakehead University hosted a job fair on Friday, January 15^th in the Agora. Thirty-six school boards and international recruitment agencies attended the fair.

Christina Buzzi, Lakehead’s career and co-operative education officer, explained the trends in employment, remarking that teaching jobs appear to be most in demand in areas of high population and economic growth.

Buzzi explained that while Alberta’s recent economic boom has led to an increased demand for teachers within the past few years, other areas of Canada’s west, especially Saskatchewan, are also higher in demand for teachers.

Noticeably in short demand for teachers are school boards from north-western and southern Ontario, where jobs have been in decline or stagnant over the past few years.

Additionally, northern and Aboriginal communities of Canada are also consistently in demand for teachers, largely because of the high turnover rate among teachers in the region.

Although isolation pay for employees attracts teachers to these communities, many teachers remain in the area for only a few years.

Also of note was the large amount of international recruiters. School boards from South Korea, Mexico, Scotland, to United Kingdom came to attract future educators.

Buzzi explains that Canadian teachers are in such high demand abroad because of value placed on having English teachers who are from English-speaking countries.

She also points to the U.K. as an area in high demand for Canadian teachers, both because of a low supply of teachers in the region and because U.K. schools notice strong work ethics among Canadian teachers.

Buzzi’s advice to students considering working abroad is to carefully research and consider all the aspects of the job, such as culture, salary, living accommodations, and hours of work.

She advises against making a hasty decision to accept any employment contract, and suggests talking to other teachers who have gained employment through the same international recruitment agency.

Buzzi says that ultimately, prospective teachers should keep their feet wet and stay on the hunt. While job fairs are a great start, keeping an eye out for different employers through school job listings will open more doors for future teachers.

Three business students travel to Toronto for accounting competition

Amy Szybalski

News Writer

On Saturday, January 9^th, three students from Lakehead University, Michelle Labate, Megan Upton, and Michael-Benoit Kuziora, travelled to Toronto to participate in a provincial accounting competition.

Lakehead students placed a respectable tenth out of thirty-five teams competing from nineteen Ontario universities.

CA$H is hosted annually by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario. According to Mona Ghaimi, the institute’s director of career information, the point is to “give a chance for students to learn about the skills they’ll need to succeed in the work of business, while competing for prizes that can help fund their education.”

“It’s a fun event that gives participants a chance to network with peers from across the province and make connections with representatives from the chartered accountant training offices,” added Ghiami.

The first place team, from University of Toronto-Mississauga, won $3000, as well as and additional $1,500 for their school’s accounting program. The second place team, University of Toronto-St George, and third place team, University of Toronto-Scarborough, won $1,500 and $750 respectively.

During the challenge, the teams participated in friendly competition that stressed different chartered accounting skills such as teamwork, leadership, organization and time management. The teams also participated in simulations designed by Eagles Flight that assessed the participants’ abilities to think under pressure.

Students were chosen by Lakehead University Accounting Club to attend the competition. Potential participants applied for a position on the team and LUAC members voted on the final team.

“We learned a lot about teamwork, social networking, economic stability, and that the only way to complete any goal in life is to work hard no matter what gets in your way,” said LU CA$H team member Michelle Labate when asked what she learned from the competition.

Labate went on to comment that she “would love to participate in the competition again, it was overall a great experience. I met a lot of very nice people, and after completing the competition, I now know where we went wrong and what we could have done to better prepare ourselves.”

Photo by Stacey Goyan

Grad says application process was incomplete and not timely

Stacey Goyan

News Editor

This spring, Lakehead University students will not get their chance to challenge their membership with the Canadian Federation of Students.

While it was announced that students would be able to vote on Lakehead’s membership with the CFS this February, president Dave Grad said the application process was not properly completed and would result in an invalid election.

Last year’s LUSU president, Richard Longtin, circulated a petition that collected 815 student signatures, more than the 10% required to hold the referendum.

Grad stated that the previous executive did not complete the necessary steps outlined in the CFS process within the timeframe, thus voiding the petition.

The LUSU president felt that running an invalid referendum would be a waste of student money.

“The cost of the referendum is over $1000 to the student body. I don’t feel it is an appropriate use of money to run an invalid referendum question.”

Grad stated that, because the timeline expired on last year’s petition, the question would have to be asked twice, once asking students to run the question, and another on whether they would like to continue membership with the CFS. He claimed this would cost students $2000 in total.

When contacted for comment, former president Richard Longtin said he felt Grad was avoiding the issue.

“Whether you like a person’s decision or not, you are bound by it,” said Longtin.

Grad responded to these claims by stating that the petition was filed with the CFS in December of 2008, which should have resulted in the question being asked in the February executive election last year.

Longtin, whose term ended early in mid-January, stated in an interview last year that the two remaining executives, Anna Wease and Matt Granville, would continue to rally behind the CFS referendum.

When the question returned come September, Grad said it was already too late.

“[T]hey sent the forms in, they had 90 days after they sent it back to him to run that. So it should have been run during my election in February last year.”

At the November 26^th Board of Directors meeting, it was announced that LUSU would run the question on whether or not students would like to have a referendum on their membership with the CFS.

During an interview on Friday, vice president finance Josh Kolic admitted to making the decision to post the question but said it wasn’t done maliciously.

According to Kolic, there was a period of time after the Christmas break during which he served as acting president. Kolic said he was uncertain as to the status of the petition and decided to post the question.

“If Dave came back and had more information about the situation and decided to take it down, at least then we erred on the side of caution.”

Grad stated that he received contact from the CFS national office stating that the referendum would be invalid. Thus he chose to pull the question.

Kolic felt that this was “another instance of the situation we’ve inherited from the previous administration.”

The VP Finance did admit that he felt students should have had a voice.

“I think given that there was a petition, the question should have been asked. The fact that it wasn’t last year is really unfortunate.”

President Grad says he’s not opposed to the idea of a referendum, but wants to avoid the consequences of an invalid election.

“If a student wants to go through this, they can get the bylaws from me and contact the CRO [at the CFS] and begin the process and run it properly.”

“Otherwise we’re going to waste our money and our time. We’re going to cause a lot of conflict and probably get into legal issues.”

“Sustainable Communities in the North” looks to promote community resilience, not sustainability

Stacey Goyan

News Editor

This February, the Thunder Bay community will gather for its first sustainability conference, hosted by Lakehead University and Confederation College.

LUSU sustainability coordinator Alex Boulet says the conference is to be held annually, bringing forward new ideas on tackling environmental issues in northern Ontario.

Boulet, the conference’s chair, and his team have been actively involved in putting together the conference, which will take place on February 25^th and 26^th.

The theme of the conference will be developing community resilience to big energy.

Boulet says community resilience is a more useful course of action for northern communities than sustainability.

“It’s talking about how you can design your community so it can withstand shocks such as food shortages, energy, and all of the things that are going to come very soon, and still have stability and still have livelihoods for your families. It’s exactly what Thunder Bay and the rest of the community is looking for.”

Boulet also says the conference hopes to attract many of the diverse communities in the region, including Aboriginal and remote communities.

The conference aims to address what Boulet calls “weaknesses” in the Northern Ontario growth plan.

“If we consult all the same communities that they say they’ve consulted and come up with something completely different, then it will basically leave some questions to be asked.”

While no government officials have confirmed they will be in attendance, Boulet says he’s optimistic that members from either the provincial or federal government will attend.

Despite this, Boulet says the conference is not just aimed at government.

The student price for the conference is a mere $20, which includes all keynote speakers as well as four meals. He stated that the conference was aimed to attract the student community.

The conference will also feature workshops, roundtables, and a green expo. Boulet says various sessions will be available for both businesses and the general public.

Various sessions will be hosted including sewing workshops, tips on gardening in the northern climate, as well as information on how to get involved in local community gardens.

The conference will also host two high school students from every northern high school. Afterward, Boulet plans to host a vision-writing contest, in which students will write a story on what their community will look like 20 years, and what it will take to accomplish it.

Conference delegates will have the opportunity to listen to keynote speaker Peter Robinson, who is the CEO of the David Suzuki Foundation. Also speaking will be Hunter Lovins, who will discuss how businesses can profit from sustainability.

The conference will be split between the Lakehead University and Confederation College campuses. Boulet hopes this will foster more cooperation between the two institutions.

Registration for the conference can be done through the LUSU office or on their website, www.scn.lusu.ca.