Students expect more Internet access than ever, and universities need to involve everyone in deciding how to provide it
Universities accustomed to gripes about classroom and office space had better get ready to deal with complaints over another scarce resource. As they welcome young people who have spent more of their lives on the Internet than watching television, Canada’s universities will be expected to provide bandwidth – lots of it – to their incoming students.
Posted in Higher Education, OpEd |
The world has seen its share of rights movements in recent years. That may not prepare it for the claims of the latest group seeking recognition – digital people.
As online computer games soar in popularity, the distinction between animated characters and their real life creators is eroding. This has given rise to perplexing new questions about the extent to which we have rights in our digital identities.
The popularity of avatars has much to do with the emergence of the online self. Avatars are the custom-designed figures created by computer users to play video games or to participate in a variety of online worlds. Recently, some nasty events have befallen these avatars, bringing moral or financial injury to their creators. Consider one famous example.
Payam Akhavan sips coffee amidst student chatter in a downtown Montreal cafe. Gentle eyes and salt-and-pepper hair complement the gracious voice that has persuaded everyone from first-year law students to the United Nations about his very big ideas on conflict resolution and genocide.
Since his seminal article “Beyond Impunity: Can International Criminal Justice Prevent Future Atrocities?” was published in the American Journal of International Law in 2001, Akhavan has been regarded as one of the most influential human rights thinkers.
Posted in Law | Leave a Comment »
Every year, universities across Canada collect millions of dollars in gifts from individuals who, for one reason or another, choose to remain nameless. And south of the border, someone just gave $100 million U.S. to forever end tuition at the Yale School of Music. Only a handful of people know who made these donations, and they’re not telling.
Posted in Feature, Higher Education | Leave a Comment »
Official gender discrimination on campus is supposed to be a thing of the past. It is curious then to discover an aspect of university life where blatant gender bias is permitted to survive conspicuously and unchallenged. The discrimination in question concerns the many scholarships which are granted only to female students.
A quick perusal of the awards page at the University of Ottawa reveals that there are at least a dozen scholarships available only to women. Historically, such awards could be justified on the grounds that female students were underrepresented and frequently confronted with institutional sexism. Today, they are simply unfair.
Consider that on a typical Canadian campus, women make up over 60 per cent of the undergraduate student body and that their presence is no longer restricted to traditionally female disciplines like arts and education. Today, women make up a majority in law and management. In medical studies, the numbers are particularly striking. At one Quebec university, a recent first-year medicine class was 80-per-cent women.
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`Information imbalances’ cost North Americans billions of dollars a year. One intrepid economist wants to change that.
Henry Schneider, an economist at Cornell University, believes that auto mechanics are no more dishonest than the rest of us. His opinion is something of a surprise in light of his research.
In a new paper, Schneider describes data from undercover visits to Canadian garages, which show that 61 per cent of the total sum spent on car repairs was completely unnecessary. Repeating the undercover experiment in the United States, he found the same thing: an industry characterized by systemic rip-offs where concern for reputation had little effect on service.
Read more in the Toronto Star
Posted in Business, Law | Leave a Comment »
Easing the Emotional Strain of Crippling Memories
While memories can be sweet, they can also be savage. Survivors of violence, rape or abuse can suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which forces them to relive their ordeal over and over. These flashbacks can be so debilitating that many PTSD sufferers find it hard to maintain relationships, hold jobs and—in extreme cases—simply leave the house. Now, however, the pioneering work of Karim Nader promises relief from trauma.
His experiments suggest damaging memories can be stripped of their potency by administering a common blood pressure drug, propranolol, as a traumatic event is being recollected. Nader’s findings, which were published in Nature, have caught the attention of the BBC and 60 Minutes.
Posted in Science | Leave a Comment »
