Classes moved to Progress Campus

During the past month of July students in the SETAS Information and Communication Engineering Technology (ICET) cluster of programs were informed by mail and e-mail that they would be relocated from Morningside to Progress campus. The move is do in part to the ongoing need to make new space available to current students, while Ontario’s first college struggles to adhere to the influx of new student’s arriving in droves. Centennial was able to take possession of the newly acquired A block building from the Toronto District School Board. This new acquirement is now being used towards classrooms and dedicated labs for almost 1,500 students enrolled in Information & Communication Engineering Technology (ICET) programs. The move involves a large number of student’s as mentioned above with many more affected from other programs, and as with any large endeavor, it comes with obstacles that must be endured.

One ongoing concern pertains to certain students needing to commute between the two aforementioned campuses to attend math 169, which must be taken at Morningside campus. The extra commuting leaves a bitter taste in some student’s mouths, especially if they already have to commute from home for classes. Computer and Communication Networking 2nd year student Nelly Muse feels that it should be all or nothing when it comes to the new migration, 

“All my classes are now at Progress except one that is still at Morningside, It doesn’t make sense,” said Muse. This roadblock is just one of the obstacles that needs to be endured during the program migration. The ICET student’s also had to wait a week to begin classes in there new building due to painting that was taking place. The students started class on September 13th, while everyone else began on the seventh. The ongoing renovations are a nuisance for some students who aren’t a fan of the smell of a newly painted building. 

“There’s still tape everywhere, it smells like primer, and it’s still not too organized,” said Muse about the ongoing renovations. Many Progress students have related concerns about the ongoing construction taking place all over the expanding campus. Parking lots are under continuing construction, and the new gym facilities will not be ready until well into the new year. 

Fellow Computer and Communication Networking student Michael Gossling was excited at first for the move just to be able to access the athletic facilities,

“I was kind of excited because they have a gym, but the gym is closed right now due to the construction,” Gossling said. CCSAI President Deval Brahmbhatt was able to point out when ask for comment on the gym situation that student’s are being offered a thirty dollar rate to access the local YMCA and Extreme Fitness for student’s athletic needs, and they will be able to use the new Progress gym when it is finished for the duration of the time that they were enrolled during the renovations. 

Out in the Cold fundraising event

The weather participated greatly for U of T’s first Out in the Cold fundraising event. Organizers were anxious over whether it would be a wet and muddy night of fundraising, and awareness towards homelessness and poverty. Luckily, fears were put to rest with a beautiful November night of 6 degrees Celsius, which is the warmest night Out in the Cold has ever had. 

Founded in 2007 at the University of Waterloo, Out in the Cold is a grassroots, annual student-run event held every November, where students and community members are invited to spend the night outside on campus, to raise money and awareness of homelessness issues in their local community.

This year, Out in the Cold took place at the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto from 7:00 PM Friday, Nov 20, 2009 to 7:00 AM Saturday, Nov 21, 2009.

The event started with an information session hosted by community worker Ann Fitzpatrick of Children's Aid Society of Toronto in the Sidney Smith building, room 2117. Miss Fitzpatrick shared statistics on what Toronto underprivileged are facing in current times. This included society needing to know that there is a visible and invisible homeless problem that has been developing for years and has boiled over due to the hard economic year. Families have been hard hit by the recession and food bank use is at a record high. With rent continually on the rise Fitzpatrick stressed that some Torontonians spend between 70 and 90 percent of income to keep a roof over there families heads. 

After the somber statistics were delivered to the crowd, the participants were ready for a night filled with discussion and revelry. 

Once the group reached Hart House Circle, they were greeted by a slew of cardboard boxes ready to be put to good use for a night of conscious raising and breaking down of misconceptions about what it means to be homeless in the 21^st century. “Safety is a focus for us, we want the fundraisers to stay warm and let the night evolve organically” organizer Jenna Vandraanen informed as she busily hustled from group to group. 

 Group member Nick Petten stated that Out in the Cold has been able to raise over $8500 for the cause in the last three years. With events now taking place at both campuses the positive momentum is keeping the group motivated. Both Nick and Jenna were confident that they would each be raising over $200 dollars each. Participants had people pledge donations towards there attempts to stand the cold for a November night. Another $250 was raised at a pub night event at O’Grady’s Tap and Grill hosted November 18^th. Ways to get involved can be found at www.outinthecold.ca

 

Liz Magor Lecture

Liz Magor is a seasoned artist who has travelled decades through her craft without falling into redundancy or pigeon holing herself along the way. All of the work that she showed us was vibrant with feeling and was very honest in bringing forth that she makes her art for herself more than anyone else, or this is at least how I about her and the lecture witnessed. This insight comes from comments the artist made along the way of her presentation. One plain example of this came early on when she was showing, and discussing the photographs she took in the early seventies of herself and her friends. She was in a photography class at the time, but informed us that she did not show these pictures to her teacher because she felt they were not what they would feel were art photos. She took the pictures for herself, which says quite a lot in terms towards self identity and personal idealism. 

I enjoy her relationship to art. She explained that she hates having to try and explain what art is, saying that it is an irritating question. She went on to tell the audience though that it is also a necessary question because art is an ongoing process that must be analyzed as you move along.   She went on in adding that she believes art happens between the interaction between the art piece and the viewer, which I found fascinating since it seemed to be in direct relation to the idea of abjection. 

Much of her work deals with material and shelter. It mutates and is a constant struggle that a person goes through against where they live. She also deals of issues surrounding having to become independent of society and debunking the myth that a person has to change their identity to totally escape society; that a person needs to mold themselves to the factors set forth by society instead of the other way around. 

Her work with cigarettes discusses how people have this need to fulfill space. A mouth is a receptacle that needs to be filled due to our nature. A mouth is always looking for friendship. A storage facility that can actually say no but usually does not in relation to cigarettes, food, or alcohol. 

Her relation to certain objects was very informing. The fact that some items have different value than they once did, an example used is an ashtray. They are now seen as a dirty object that is no longer in vogue even though they are still a very handy object with purpose. This led her to working with trays. A tray is never the focal point; it is always what is on the tray. Dead things becoming appealing, which led me back to thinking of abjection with the relationships between objects being portrayed in ways that we do not expect them to be viewed or treated.   

Help Conquer Cancer with your Computer

Help Conquer Cancer with your Computer

Cole Carruthers 

U of T's Help Conquer Cancer project is one of several projects running on the World Community Grid. The WC Grid is a distributed-computing network funded by IBM supporting large-scale, long-term, compute-intensive, research projects.  These projects are essentially very long, repetitive calculations that need to be performed on a lot of data -- long enough that a single computer might take tens of thousands of years to complete.  A project's data is divided into work units and sent out to WC Grid members' computers. To participate in the World Community Grid, you just need a computer
that runs Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X.  It can be a laptop or a
desktop. To participate sign up at, http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ first, download WCG software and then specify the project you want your spare cycles to go to.

The WC Grid, who hosts the project, was founded about 5 years ago. U of T’s Dr. Jurisica’s collaboration with Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, (HWI) started about 11 years ago, and Research Associate, Christian A. Cumbaa’s involvement began in 2001. Work on the WC Grid Help Conquer Cancer project started in late 2006, and the project launched in November 2007.

Christian Cumbaa was gracious enough to explain the process, “A project's data is divided into work
units and sent out to WC Grid members' computers.  Each work unit takes a few seconds to download, using only a
computer's idle time. Once
complete, it is uploaded from the members' computers back to the WC Grid
server.” 

“Our project, Help Conquer Cancer, is attempting to accelerate the process of protein structure solution, to-date, HWI has screened over 12,000 proteins and generated over 115,000,000 images.”

       The Help Conquer Cancer project is a computer vision program for
recognizing signs of crystal growth (among other reactions, e.g.,
precipitation, phase separation) in these 115,000,000 images.  One of
the major goals of the project is to score each image by computer.  A
deeper goal is to improve the science of protein crystallization by
data-mining (detecting patterns in) the assembled database of
crystallization results.
 

When Cumbaa was asked about the size of the project he stated, “The numbers describing the World Community Grid are crazy.

There are about 520,000 members that contribute to the WC Grid, donating
compute time from 1,580,000 computers.  Yesterday, members contributed
288 CPU-years in total to the WC Grid projects, meaning a single, average
computer would require 288 years running at 100% capacity to perform the same calculations. 
In terms of personnel, this high-throughput protein crystallization
project is one of several projects supervised by Dr. Jurisica.  I handle
the day-to-day research on the project, analyzing the results coming
back from WC Grid.  A second researcher (recent U of T grad) joined the
team earlier this summer.  We have a system administrator who maintains
the servers that send data back and forth to the WC Grid, and to our
collaborators at HWI.  Three graduate students in the Department of
Computer Science, U of T, have developed a version of our HCC image
analysis software. WC Grid itself is supported by IBM, and runs the project for free. Our research is funded by the following grants and organizations: the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Research Chair Program, the Natural Science & Engineering Research Council of Canada, and IBM.”

  Distributed computing itself is a decades-old field. 
A few factors laid the groundwork for those early public projects:
public awareness of the Internet, beginning with the birth of the World
Wide Web in 1993, and the creation of the Java programming language. 

The technology will evolve along with the computer industry.  Networks
are getting faster, the cost of memory is dropping, and computing power
is growing.
 

Not many programming problems can be divided so easily.  Perhaps within 5 years we will see new, more decentralized volunteer-programming networks that rely less on CPU power and more on networking.
 

Health & Wellness at Centennial

A day in court

Justice came fast and swift for Selladurai Selvanayagam, 47, just as fast as the minivan he used as a weapon in June 2007 to maim three people.

Justice John McMahon wasted no time Tuesday in handing down a sentence of four years and one month for the combined offences of three counts of attempted murder, three counts of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing bodily harm, and three counts of criminal negligence causing bodily harm.

“Honour of ones family does not excuse committing criminal acts in Canada,” said Justice McMahon to the accused before handing down the sentence in Superior Court, at 361 University Avenue.

Selvanayagam, 47, pleaded guilty to the offences that took place three years prior, which involved trying to run over his then 16-year-old daughter, son-in-law, and the daughter’s 17-year-old boyfriend near Stephen Leacock Collegiate, on Birchmount Road, north of Sheppard Avenue. The father was trying to commit an “honour killing” for several reasons that Justice McMahon took into consideration when deciding Selvanayagam’s sentence.

Selvanayagam, an immigrant of Sri Lanka, didn’t approve of his daughter’s relationship with Prashanna “Pram” Anadarajah. Selvanayagam believed Anadarajah was not worthy of dating his daughter Anitha, since he felt the boy was from a lower caste and it would bring shame to his family.

Anitha went missing from home for three days before the assault occurred. When she was found by her father on June 1st, 2007, he drove his minivan into his daughter, her boyfriend, and son-in-law causing physical damage to all three. After being dragged five meters by the vehicle, the son-in-law, Lenin Sandrasingam, 21,  received a broken pelvis, and still walks with a cane three years later. Anitha received head trauma, a fractured clavicle, and severe trauma of the liver. Anitha’s boyfriend, Prashanna “Pram” Anadarajah, 18, suffered a sprained ankle.

“I thought he did a really good job and was appropriate when factors were considered,” said Crown attorney, Eadit Rocach.

Justice McMahon first delivered a five year sentence to be served in a federal penitentiary. He reached the sentence of four years and one month by taking into consideration that Selvanayagam had already served 11 months during the trial. the Crown had asked for six years, and the defence asked for a sentence of three years.

Numerous circumstances had to be taken into account in deciding an appropriate sentence for the troubled father. During the trial Justice McMahon weighed out several accounts of good standing that the accused had demonstrated.

He had no prior convictions, plead guilty, and took responsibility for his actions. These factors were taken into account by the court.

“Taking responsibility saves the victims anguish, save the court time and money, and the family wanting the charges withdrawn,” said McMahon, were mitigating factors that needed to be addressed.   

During the trial it had been established that Selvanayagam was having difficulties in adjusting to life in Canada and grasping western values. It was also established that leading up to the assault, Selvanayagam had been suffering from depression, was supposed to be taking medication, and on one occasion had tried to take his own life. 

circumstances enraging Selvanayagam involved thinking Anadarajah was a terrorist, to believing that no one in his community would wish to ever marry his daughter in the future.

 

Youth shot near Bathurst and Wilson

A cold grey sky casted an ominous backdrop over shooting victim Tyrone Bracken’s old neighborhood the day after his death.

Few people could be found walking along the streets, with more movement coming from fallen leaves rolling along the cement outside the doorway of 135 Neptune Drive, where the 16-year-old was fatally shot Wednesday around 4 p.m. 

The few neighbors present were still trying to come to terms with what had transpired where they live the day before.

“He was a really good kid, a respectful man. He was really funny, outgoing, I knew him through school, he played football,” said fellow student, Amanda Lalla, 16.

The fellow resident knew Bracken from their mutual neighborhood in the Bathurst Street. and Wilson Avenue. area of North York. Her eyes welled up as she stopped to think about not seeing Bracken on the way to school any longer.

Lalla attends Sir Sandford Fleming Academy, where Bracken was a popular and well liked student.

“its quiet here,” she said. “His friends are really upset today, hopefully police find out who did this soon, ” Lalla responded.

A group of mothers huddled together in a bus shelter on Neptune Drive, clutching their children as they waited for the preschool bus to pick them up. The women talked rapidly to one another as one of them raises their head every so often to scan the area.

One of the mothers, who only wished to give the name of Princess, said the residents have had a restless night and know there will be more to come.

“I wanna move right now, said Princess, as she tightened the grip on her daughters hand.

“Are we gonna move mommy,” her daughter asked in a worried quizzical voice.

“I have nightmares, we know the boy, its not easy, the kids just got off the bus,” said Princess, as she looked down at her young daughter with the eyes of a parent who can’t help but ponder worse case scenarios as she thought back to the events of the day before.

Contessa L. and her husband walked briskly along the cold cement sidewalk as they picked up their young daughter from the bus stop.

When asked about Bracken, L. lifted her head to answer as she kept moving past the apartment doorway where the killing took place.

“He was a classmate of our son,” said L.

Mr. L. continued the conversation as Mrs. L. quickened the pace with her young daughter.

“He was just visiting, he was from Brampton,” said Mr. L. about Brackens past before he arrived in the North York area.

When building management was approached for comment, they declined to give a statement towards the event that has cast a heavy shadow over the tight knit community.

The crime falls into the lap of police division 32. When asking Constable Cotton for comment on the case,

“The investigator in charge of the case is Detective Biggerstaff of homicide squad, I’m waiting for him to give me further information,” said Cotton.

Investigators are appealing to the community for assistance. Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 416-808-7400, Crime Stoppers anonymously at 416-222-TIPS 

Matlow wins Ward 22

Toronto District School Board trustee, Josh Matlow will now have to change his office letterhead to St. Paul’s councillor for Ward 22. Matlow, 35, who is known for his energetic personality, will be ushering in a new beginning to the north Toronto ward, which has been represented by Michael Walker since 1982.

  Monday night’s ballot count was in Matlow’s favor early on, with a constant lead of 1,000 votes over rival candidate, Chris Sellors. By 8:30 p.m., City Pulse News declared Matlow the victor with a vote count of 10,046 to Sellors lagging 6,832. A celebratory atmosphere quickly broke out at Matlow’s election headquarters, located at the Sports Centre Café, at 49 St. Clair Avenue West. 

“I am very grateful to all the people that were behind me from the beginning,” Matlow told the cheering crowd.  “I knew I could win and am thankful for having such talented and tremendous support.” 

Matlow was surrounded by friends and family, who were just as happy with themselves as they were with their new city councillor. Various volunteers maneuvered through the packed gathering to offer high-fives and back slaps for all of the time and effort they contributed to get to this moment in time. Matlow announced his candidacy early on in the election and held a relentless pace that none of the other candidates could match.

Once the crowd finished with the initial celebrating, Matlow addressed the sweeping changes involving the mayoral election race. When he mentioned that Rob Ford was now the new mayor of Toronto, his announcement was met by various boos and jeers. Matlow addressed the crowds disdain by stating, “above all I want city hall to be functional and to be fiscally responsible towards the community.” 

Matlow made it very clear throughout his campaign that he was not concerned with who became the next mayor. He even went as far in stating on his election website that, “I am not endorsing a mayoral candidate. I will work on behalf of the residents of Ward 22 as their councillor. If the new mayor proposes something that is good for our community, I will support it. However, if there is a proposal that is not supported by my residents, I will be the first to challenge it.” 

This grassroots approach towards putting Ward 22 voters first and acting upon their concerns easily put him over the top on election night. Matlow was able to bolster some high profile endorsements which included former Much Music personality, Erica Ehm, Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, and a glowing review from the Toronto Star.

Matlow’s only real competition throughout the election came from Chris Sellors, who has spent the last five years as executive assistant to Michael Walker. Major issues focused on throughout the campaign included development, public transit, and rental fees for housing. Matlow wants to see a future Eglinton Crosstown Light Rail Transit line turned into a subway that will run to Pearson Airport. He wants rental housing to stay at affordable levels for the large section of Ward 22 residents who rent, and wants to keep residents concerns and needs met before corporate interests when it comes to new development. The only certain thing towards the future of Ward 22 will be that all eyes and ears will be focused on Matlow as he takes the reigns from a highly respected individual who held the council seat for nearly thirty years.

Before Matlow finished his victory speech, he wiped his brow and said, “time to have a cold drink and celebrate and get to work tomorrow.”