Archive for Macleans.ca

RIM founder’s gifts now total $123 million

The founders of Research In Motion (RIM), the Waterloo, Ont. based produce of BlackBerry products, have fallen. But one of them, Mike Lazaridis, is ready to make a new investment. He and his wife Ophelia pledged $21 million to the University of Waterloo on Wednesday. “History has shown us that a relatively small investment in fundamental research in physics and in science today can lead to huge innovation tomorrow,” Lazaridis said. The money will fund chairs in condensed matter and astrophysics, a new science building and scholarships for mathematics students. The couple have donated $123 million in total, after funding the Institute for Quantum Computing and the soon-to-open Quantum Nano Centre. To get a sense of how big those donations are, consider that only one gift to a Canadian university exceeded $20 million last year, reports Academica.

Celebrating Canada’s 3M Teaching Fellows

Photo by Andrew Tolson

Marjorie Johnson is just one of the ten 3M Teaching Fellows announced in the annual Maclean’s student issue, on sale this week. To see who the other nine winners are, click here.

Story by Gustavo Vieira.

A soothing guitar ballad is piped through the sound system, muffling the chatter of a few dozen second-year kinesiology students; they’re waiting for anatomy class to begin at an auditorium at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont. A slide show reviewing the body parts studied in previous classes plays on a loop: the medial pterygoid, trunks of brachial plexus, the maxillary artery, and so on. Two minutes later, the lights dim; a clip from Grey’s Anatomy appears, depicting a blood-gushing patient being treated by a frazzled young medical resident struggling to contain the bleeding. The students go silent. It’s time for Marjorie Johnson to start her lecture on the intricate anatomy of the human neck. Not before she pulls up a photo of Steve Nash, the Phoenix Suns superstar, his neck’s veins, muscles and nerves bulging beneath his skin as he protects the ball from an opponent at a basketball game. “He’s one of my heroes,” Johnson later confesses, “so they see Steve Nash a lot.”

Continue reading Marjorie Johnson, top of her class

Results from the National Survey of Student Engagement

Click on the charts below to see results from the 2011 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a study that university administrators pore over each year to find out how their students are learning. Both first and senior-year students have answered questions that illustrate how well their universities performed on the five Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice: level of academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, active and collaborative learning, enriching educational experience, and supportive campus environment. You may be surprised about who’s on top. It’s not always the same schools that rank highly in the Maclean’s University Rankings.

Select a chart below. On the next screen, place your cursor over the chart and click to enlarge.

39,000 students can’t use their bus passes

A Saint Mary’s University student said he quit his classes on Monday because the transit strike in Halifax has made it too difficult to get to school. ”I was already missing assignments and quizzes and stuff due to the strike,” second-year criminology student Chase Sabourin told CBC News. “The strike could be over this week, it could be another month down the road. I’m not going to wait around hoping it’s going to end tomorrow,” he added. Sabourin said he plans to return in September. Seven hundred Amalgamated Transit Union workers went on strike on Feb. 2. rendering Halifax’s 39,000 student transit passes useless, at least for now.

Banned from Medicine Hat College

Medicine Hat College has evicted a student from residence and banned him from campus after he pointed a handgun at several people at a campus residence on Saturday, reports radio station CJCY. Police say the banned student, who is in their custody, will be charged with several offenses.

Previous referendum failed

Students at the University of Regina have voted to add a $1.00 fee to fund the campus Pride Centre for Sexuality and Gender Diversity, which supports queer youth. Of the 475 students who voted, 86 per cent were in favour, according to unofficial results. According to The Carillon student newspaper, students rejected the addition of a $7.00 annual fee for the Pride Centre in 2008.

Would cost $12-million more

Vancouver’s transit authority has released a report on the viability of a gondola to ferry students and professors up Burnaby Mountain to Simon Fraser University. The report by CH2M Hill found that it would cost $12-million more than using buses over a 25-year period. That means it won’t be built anytime soon. The option may be considered in a “future strategic transportation plan,” says TransLink. Many people supported the aerial alternative because winter weather often keeps buses from navigating the icy roads and because the gondola may be more environmentally friendly than buses. However, the gondola was opposed by some homeowners who would have lived underneath it.

Male suspect had phone in his hand

Security camera footage from Toronto Police

Toronto police are looking for a man after several women reported seeing a male lurking in washrooms at York University over the past week.

Police say that on Jan. 9, at 6:05 p.m. two women in a washroom stall at Curtis Lecture Hall noticed a man reach under the stall they were in, holding a cellular phone. The man then fled. The next day at 8:30 p.m., a different woman walked into a washroom at Curtis Hall and saw a man looking over a stall. He fled once more.

The suspect is described as brown skinned, aged 20 to 25 years old, 5’8″ to 5’9″ high with a thin face and chinstrap beard, dark eyes and black hair. He was last seen wearing a grey knitted sweater, blue jeans, grey shiny sneakers with two straps and a grey toque.

Students had been waiting in line for days

Capture from RavenIonosphere on Flickr

A woman died from head and chest injuries and three others are in critical condition after a stampede at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, reports The Telegraph.

The chaos can be viewed in this amateur footage.

It happened on Tuesday morning after hundreds of applicants and their families stormed a gate to try and get coveted spots in the university. Some had waited in line since Sunday morning. The university received 85,000 applications for 11,000 first-year spots. The seats available Tuesday were “overfill.”

South Africa has a youth unemployment rate of roughly 50 per cent, according to the OECD.

Roughly 530 affected

Roughly 530 students at the University of British Columbia were billed two or three times for housing, tuition or other fees in December due to a glitch in the school’s electronic funds transfer system. More than $2.1 million was mistakenly scooped from accounts, UBC officials told The Ubyssey. Payments made between Dec. 23 and 28 were processed multiple times by a third-party company called BeanStream. UBC says duplicate payments will be credited back to student’s accounts and BeanStream will reimburse students for insufficient funds charges and overdraft fees.