All Posts Tagged With: "Centennial College"
McGill called ‘too white,’ Drake & an illegal rooming house
What students are talking about today (February 11th)
From Drake's Shoppers Drug Mark shot music video "Started From the Bottom"
1. After Drake won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album on Sunday night he released a video for his new single, Started From the Bottom. Much of the video was filmed at a Shoppers Drug Mart in Binbrook, Ont, according to the Hamilton Spectator, and it also features his mom standing outside his childhood home in Toronto, reports Canada.com. Why do we care? My guess is because Canadians love to see Canadian things in videos they think Americans will watch. For more Grammy coverage see Macleans.ca.
2. City of Toronto inspectors have found what they say is an illegal rooming house near U of T Scarborough and Centennial College. Officials told the Toronto Star it was probably full of foreign students. Eleven people were living in rooms in the majorly renovated house. Real estate agent Yixuan (Jessica) Wang has been accused of arranging the leases. The city says there are 120 active files stemming from complaints over suspected illegal properties in Scarborough where there is just one 765-bed student residence (at UTSC) for nearly 15,000 post-secondary students.
Continue reading McGill called ‘too white,’ Drake & an illegal rooming house
Teens who sent Legoman into space had their pick of schools
Surprisingly, neither chose engineering
When Asad Muhammad and Mathew Ho mapped out a route for the lego man they hoped to send into space last January, they little imagined they’d be changing the course of their own lives as well.
The voyage they planned for the toy figure was originally conceived as a fun project for two high school friends who shared a love of science. By attaching cameras to a weather balloon and styrofoam container, the 18-year-olds from Toronto hoped only to capture pictures of the earth’s curvature.
But the lego figure they included in their makeshift craft on a whim catapulted the test flight to greater heights than Ho and Muhammad ever imagined. Footage of the plastic figure soaring 24 kilometres above the earth garnered instant praise once it had been posted to Youtube, and the teens found themselves dead centre on the public radar.
Continue reading Teens who sent Legoman into space had their pick of schools
Teens who launched LEGO-man into space talk university
Think they’ll both take engineering? Wrong.
When Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad play with LEGO, they don’t build the usual castles, battleships, or Star Wars X-wings.
The two grade 12 students from Toronto constructed a helium-filled weather balloon and launched a LEGO man holding a Canadian flag into space, more than 24 kilometers up.
The LEGO man’s space adventure was recorded and a GPS device allowed Ho and Muhammad to relocate their plastic astronaut.
In fact, you probably already know this. Their video has more than 2.6 million views on YouTube.
Continue reading Teens who launched LEGO-man into space talk university
College backtracks after telling students to dropout
A delay in criminal record checks left Humber College nursing students unsure if they could take a clinical placement
Janny Lee was shocked this week when she received a letter from Humber College, where she is pursuing a nursing degree, informing her that she would have to withdraw from the clinical portion of her program by Monday. The reason? The College has yet to receive her criminal record check, despite the fact she applied for it in mid-July. Dozens of students received similar letters, but the College is now backtracking, recognizing that there has been an uncontrollable delay affecting several Ontario colleges.
In previous years, the eight weeks Lee allowed for her background to be checked would have been more than enough time. This year, because of a regulatory change that prohibits third-parties from performing criminal checks, thus placing the responsibility solely on the RCMP, it can take as long as four months for records to be retrieved.
Criminal record checks are compulsory for nursing students to be placed in a hospital or for an early childhood education student to be placed in a daycare.
Initially, Lee was furious because she may have had no choice but to dropout out for a year. “We weren’t notified about the change,” she said.
At first, Andrew Leopold, a spokesman for Humber, said the situation was out of the College’s hands. “It’s an RCMP responsibility,” he told Maclean’s on Wednesday. But, by Thursday afternoon, the College was preparing to send another letter to students, informing them that even if they haven’t received their police check, they may still be allowed to continue on in the program. Students will be required to sign a declaration affirming that they will have a clean record, and meet with the agency responsible for placing them in a clinical setting. “We will work to support the students,” Leopold said. But “the final decision is at the discretion of the agency.” If an agency won’t accept the compromise, the College says it will work with students on a “case by case” basis.
At least two petitions had been circulating among students to convince the College to reverse its decision. Lee had contacted Rosario Marchese, the NDP Member of the Provincial Parliament who represents her riding to express her concerns. Marchese was going to hold a press conference on Friday, but Lee says that is no longer necessary given that the situation is being resolved.
Disallowing third-parties from performing record checks is an attempt to close a loophole that could see sex-offenders receive a clean check if they changed their name. The RCMP will be cross-checking all requests for record checks against databases for birthdays and other biographical information. If there is doubt as to the identity of an individual, they will be called in for fingerprinting. Four times as many people have been called in to verify their identity this year compared to previous years.
About 80 Humber nursing and early childhood education students are still awaiting their police checks. The delay is also impacting students at several other Ontario colleges, including George Brown College and Centennial College.
College presidents: gaining on their more highly paid university peers
The pay of college executives still trails that of universities, but they’re catching up
Colleges are often unfairly seen as the second tier of the higher education universe—and, as we noted last year, that extends to the compensation of college administrators, who have long been paid substantially less than their university peers
So did anything change in 2008? Yes. Ontario’s Sunshine List salary disclosure was released today, and the tally of Ontario college employees earning more than $100,000 (the threshold for inclusion on the list) is, as always, much shorter than the count for universities. However, the number of college senior administrators earning more than $200,000 has grown by nearly two-thirds, and several highly paid college heads are taking home university-president-sized paychecks.
The highest paid college president in Ontario is Frederick Miner of Seneca College. With a salary of $406,000 and taxable benefits worth $5,000, his compensation is enough to put him squarely in the upper tier of university administrators. Miner’s salary is more than that paid to the president of the largest university in the country, David Naylor of the University of Toronto. (The latter’s salary was $380,000).
Conestoga College president John Tibbits was paid $387,000. That’s more than the president of neighbouring Wilfrid Laurier University. (The president of the other university just down the road, the University of Waterloo was however paid about $101,000 more).
The presidents of five other Ontario colleges — Humber, Sheridan, George Brown, Mohawk and Algonquin — earned over $300,000. Their pay is below that awarded the presidents of large Ontario universities, but in line with the compensation given to presidents of smaller Ontario universities. For example, Dennis Mock, president of Nipissing University, Ontario’s second-smallest public university, was paid $271,000. Bonnie Patterson, president of Brock, last year received total compensation of $338,000.
The pay gap between colleges and universities appears to be larger in Western Canada. According to BC public sector salary disclosure, as compiled by the Vancouver Sun, there were 182 employees of the BC university and college system earning more than $200,000. (Data is for either 2006-07 or 2007-08). Of those 182 highly paid individuals, only two were from the college or institute system: the acting and outgoing presidents of BCIT. (What’s more, hardly any of the 182 members of the over $200K club came from the former university college system; almost all worked at one of the province’s four traditional universities, in particular UBC).
Centential College hosts ‘dirty bomb’ mass casualty exercise
100 bloodied, screaming students put emergency staff to the test this weekend
Panic and mayhem swept across a Toronto college campus Saturday as about 100 screaming, blood-stained students hobbled in to receive medical care, but it was all part of a training exercise aimed at testing how emergency services might respond to a nuclear incident.
The mock disaster centred around a fictional “dirty bomb” explosion and multi-vehicle crash on Highway 401 — Canada’s busiest highway — in which a plume of radioactive dust was released into the air.
As part of the simulation, the students smeared fake blood on themselves and moved through Centennial College’s make-believe hospital.
From the decontamination area to the triage centre, the emergency room to the pharmacy, medical, paramedic and nursing students from several nearby colleges and universities as well as staff from the Rouge Valley Health System were put to the test.
“Gradually we’re hoping we’re building more and more capability within the health-care system in Toronto and Ontario and in Canada to cope with mass casualty events,” said Dr. Paul Arnold, an emergentologist with the University Health Network who was leading a group of government and health-agency observers through the exercise. “(Saturday’s) exercise is particularly topical because everyone always worries about terrorist activities and bombs,” he said. “But much of what we do today applies to building collapses, earthquakes, fires on subways and flu epidemics . . . all of which are a lot more common than terrorist bombs.”
Among the participants were some 100 staffers from hospitals in Pickering and Ajax who were on hand to test their emergency preparedness plans. Event organizer Dr. Laurie Mazurik said while a dirty bomb situation is a little different than your typical nuclear disaster, the simulation is critical for these hospitals, given their proximity to the Darlington and Pickering nuclear power plants.
“Although this isn’t a nuclear exercise . . . they have to be very well aware of a nuclear event and a release of radioactivity as well,” she said. “If something were to happen at a nuclear plant, they would be the ones that would be most affected by it.”
Noting the goal was really to see how staff cope at the emergency department and management levels, Arnold said the two levels were kept far apart from each other to make things even more difficult.
As is typical in a mass casualty event, the scenario also included the dissemination of false information which can lead to panic, patient overload, waiting-room mob scenes and the breakdown of cellphone services.
“We want people to be functioning under stressful conditions . . . so people will really be forced to think hard, make mistakes and recover from them,” Arnold said. “That process is what helps people learn.”
From finding ways to get 20 to 30 more nurses on duty, to figuring out how to deal with folks who are demanding medication they don’t need, it’s all part of the drill, he added.
The live, mass-casualty exercise caps a one-day conference examining the chemical, biological, radiation and nuclear readiness of Ontario hospitals and communities.
Mazurik said she’s helped organize about 16 mass-casualty simulations in four years, many of which have involved city paramedics, firefighters and police officers, as well as federal and provincial government agencies.
A national exercise involving a pandemic is slated to take place next May, she said.
While the 9-11 attacks spawned the idea, Arnold said the 2003 outbreak of SARS in Toronto gave it a “sharper focus.”
- with a report from CP
At the Auto Show
Lots of cool concepts and education too!
I am checking out the Canadian International Auto Show this morning. Centennial College is holding a competition for high school students which I am going to take photographs of.
I notice that a lot of post-secondary institutions are present with kiosks. I may grab some pictures of those has well.
(Forgive the dek, mornings are not my speciality)
