The Cannon March 2017

THE CANNON SERVING UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO ENGINEERING STUDENTS SINCE 1978

MARCH 2017, VOLUME XXXIX

RESEARCH/INDUSTRY

The Ladies of the Iron Ring RAHEMEEN AHMED Cannon Contributor In the fading glory of 4th century Alexandria, a woman addressed a group of her students on the topic of philosophy. Her name was Hypatia, and she was much more than a philosopher.

She was an astronomer, a mathematician, and one of the world’s earliest recorded female inventors. In the centuries that followed, the world witnessed the rise of bright and brilliant female scientists and engineers who discovered radioactive elements and comets, won Nobel prizes, and took part in research that would pave the way for groundbreaking discoveries.

In 2016, the

United Nations began commemorating February 11th as the International Day for Women and Girls in Science, in recognition of the need to empower female scientists, engineers and inventors as a part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

While UN observances are often significant in terms of drawing attention towards an issue, they are not as effective at resolving the root cause of the issue.

Professor Amy Bilton from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering pointed out: “People reinforce traditional roles without even realizing that they are doing it. Also, due to a lack of female researchers, young women

The leaky pipeline of women in research Credit: UNESCO often lack role models whom they can relate to with from a young age.”

Women continued on page 7

The Big Picture: How Machine Learning is Becoming an Irreplaceable Part of Medical Imaging and Diagnostics SAM PENNER Cannon Senior Editor How is machine learning (ML) impacting the field of medical imaging today, and what does it have to offer to the field of diagnostic medicine?

Medical imaging and diagnostics is a vital field of medicine, which includes

many imaging modalities used to image parts of the human body to provide diagnoses and treatments of disease. Techniques using MRI, (PET)-CT/MRI, and 3D ultrasound imaging are some of the many tools radiologists use to diagnose illnesses ranging from cancer to Alzheimer’s.

The Government of

How Relevant Are Our Courses? page 4

Canada estimates that, as of 2014, Canada has a medical device market accounting for around 2% of the global market, worth an estimated US$6.7 billion. They also estimate that diagnostic imaging accounts for approximately 20% of the money spent as a percentage of total medical device sales in 2014 in Canada.

The impact Canada is making in this industry is significant. According to the Government of Canada, their innovation agenda “aims to make Canada a global centre for innovation.” Ontario is home to a number of world-class research centres specializing in medical imaging including Sunnybrook Research

What Leads to Loyalty to Clubs? page 8

Institute, the University Health Network (UHN), and Robarts Research Institute, to name a few.

According to a report released by MaRs in 2009, the University of Toronto has the largest Department of Medical Imaging in Canada.

ML continued on page 6

An Analysis of Journalism page 20

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THE CANNON EDITOR-IN CHIEF Lu Chen SENIOR EDITORS Dale Gottlieb Bob Kong Zhenglin Liu Sam Penner Andrew Uderian Linda Yu MARKETING/DISTRIBUTION HEAD Namya Syal PHOTOGRAPHY HEAD Sayuri Guruge LAYOUT HEAD Minh-Tam Nguyen GRAPHICS HEAD Rick Liu WEBMASTER Wibisha Balendran

Letter from the Editor Heyo Skule!

This is the last issue of the 1T6-1T7 Skule year, and I think we saved the best for last. Not only are this issue’s articles relevant to the student body, but they’re also very interesting. We have an article on the impact of machine learning on the healthcare industry, a rhetorical analysis on how science is reported in journalism, an in-depth view of group midterms, and of course, a column on food.

The Cannon has improved dramatically over the past couple of years. We’ve increased readership, recruited very talented writers, editors, photographers, graphic artists, layout heads, and broke some pretty juicy stories. I’m very excited to see what the future will bring for this paper, as I’m sure The Cannon will continue to grow.

I’d like to extend my gratitude to the entire editorial board for sticking it out with me this long, and the new members who joined us for this last issue. This paper wouldn’t exist without all of your hard work, and I really can’t thank you all enough.

Peace out,

ARTICLE WRITERS Rahemeen Ahmed Hannah Bendig Daniel Brlas Hannah Eng Ahnaf Ferdous Marguerite Tuer-Sipos

Lu Chen Editor-in-Chief, 1T6 - 1T7

GRAPHICS Ciel Emond Muhammad Qumbar Ali READING WEEK PHOTOS Hannah Bendig Dale Gottlieb Aidan Jappy Connor Lawless Rick Liu

THE CANNON

10 King’s College Road Sandford Fleming Building Room B740 Toronto, ON M5S 3G4 cannon@skule.ca cannon.skule.ca

CLAIMER The Cannon is the official (serious) newspaper of the University of Toronto Engineering Society. Established in 1978, it serves the undergraduate students of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, with a circulation of up to 3000.

Submissions are welcome; e-mail cannon@skule.ca. Advertising and subscription information is available from the Engineering Society at 416-978-2917.

DISCLAIMER The views expressed in this newspaper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Engineering Society unless so indicated. The editors reserve the right to modify submissions to comply with the newspaper’s and the Engineering Society’s policies.

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Commuting in Toronto: an Analysis AHNAF FERDOUS Cannon Contributor With a population of around 2.8 million people in Toronto proper, and 6 million across the GTA, there’s no question that Toronto is the most populous and one of the fastest growing cities in Canada; from 2011 to 2016, there was a 4.46% increase in population.

During that same period, hardly any transit projects, service improvements or increases in road capacity have been implemented (in fact, they’ve been cut). All of this gives rise to the endless frustration of gridlocked traffic and ridiculously full vehicles. The million dollar question then is: why is Toronto’s transportation system so poor?

Winter Woes Every commuter’s worst fear is heavy snow. Snow can be beautiful when one is looking out from a window, but it’s another story on the roads. Everyone is taken by surprise when heavy snowfall hits: drivers, pedestrians, snow ploughs, and train operators alike. Snow ploughs try their best to clear major roadways in the early hours before the hectic morning rush, and their effort must be commended.

However, snow can continue to accumulate on missed non-major roadways, or reaccumulate if it falls heavy enough. This can cause distress for drivers who must drive to work in these conditions, especially if their cars are not equipped with snow tires.

Nonetheless, commuters who take transit are affected the most by far. Walking to a bus stop can be a challenge if the distance is long and sidewalks are in poor condition or covered with snow. More important is the issue of how well the buses can operate in these

conditions, particularly within the TTC. TTC buses are not equipped with snow tires at all, since it is not a requirement for these buses, which have large enough tires with treads that can maneuver through the snow. However, the fact remains that buses, especially articulated buses used on busy routes like Eglinton or Dufferin, are extremely slow treading through the snow, and are prone to be stuck.

Additionally, catenary and third rail fires caused by ice buildup can shut down whole streetcar and subway lines, and diesel engines in buses are notorious for not starting in cold weather.

Thus, bus, streetcar and subway service tends to become slower, or disappear entirely.

Considering morning exams, this can be quite stressful for commuter students, who set their alarms earlier and plan ahead, but things do not quite work out all the time. This can be seen right here at Skule, where we have had unfortunate records of students missing ESP II quizzes due to station disturbances in inclement weather. So, what can be done? Perhaps increasing bus frequency beforehand

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Queens Park & College St Intersection Credit: Sayuri Guruge route or plan with us just in out of pocket. Nevertheless, case anything goes wrong. many believe that the introduction of these tolls could Construction Impacts, improve traffic flow, as seen Present and Future in other cities which have used this practice, and the Construction also plays a revenue could be used to large part in Toronto’s traffic fund improvements elsecongestion. The downtown where in the system. At least core is so littered with var- something is being put into ious construction projects place to try to improve trafthat it’s a common source fic. In addition, subway, LRT, of anxiety for morning and commuter rail (such commuters coming in from as the Spadina, Eglinton, the suburbs. On the bright and Finch projects and GO Transit electrification) are being built by GO Transit, Metrolinx, and the TTC (as well as transit agencies in the 905) to expand Toronto’s small subway system in order to match the hundreds of kilometres of rapid transit offered in other large cities side, major projects such as such as New York, London the Gardiner Expressway and Hong Kong. reconstruction and the massive extension of the How Do I Ride?

407 East Highway this past summer may improve comAfter taking into conmuting for certain portions sideration all the aspects of of the populace. commuting in Toronto, a A couple of months ago, decision needs to be made. however, the introduction of Particularly for university tolls on the DVP has caused students, transportation can a huge uproar from com- be a major factor in decidmuters, who now not only ing whether to save money have to endure their morn- and commute the whole seing commute but also pay mester or to find a residence

Transportation can be a major factor in deciding whether to [...] commute

based on weather forecasts could solve this issue for all commuters. Looking at long-term solutions, implementing more redundancy in the network with extra lines or weatherproofing transit infrastructure and vehicles. Anyways, commuting in the winter in Toronto sucks, but for now the only thing that we can do is make sure we check the weather regularly and always have an alternate

within walking distance of the university.

Toronto’s transportation network is far from perfect, but changes and modifications are being put into place to improve the commute for the future. So, in the meantime, make sure you know about any construction that is occurring on your route, and consider all possible detours to get to your destination. If you can afford it, finding an apartment downtown might be a relief from a boring commute and a lively experience.

If you think you can handle the commute or do not think you want to live downtown, bear the commute for now because changes are happening. For commuting students, if you have an early exam or quiz, the best you can do is get up earlier and pack everything the night before, check for subway/ bus closures beforehand, and have a backup plan (like Uber) just in case. Let’s just hope that the average daily Torontonian commute time of 65.6 minutes, which is decent for the ‘worst in Ontario,’ doesn’t become worst in the world.

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Is UofT’s Engineering Curriculum Relevant?

With rapidly changing technology that’s revolutionizing so many different industries, there’s a non-zero chance that some of the material we’re being taught in classes today will no longer be relevant by the time we enter industry. There may even be some courses now that are already obsolete, and the Faculty just hasn’t had enough time to update its curriculum. So just how relevant is the content that Canada’s premier engineering school is teaching to its students?

Mechanical Engineering HANNAH ENG Cannon Contributor The Mechanical Engineering curriculum is logically structured in the sense that the material builds upon itself. First year courses cover the principles of a wide range of topics: statics and dynamics, materials and chemistry, electrical, calculus, coding, and

everyone’s favorite-- linear algebra. These principles set foundational knowledge for upper year courses: stats, thermodynamics, circuits, mechanical design, etc.

Curriculum then becomes more “streamlined” as Mechs have to choose two streams to focus their studies on after second year. Generally most find that Mechanical Engineering courses are

relevant with respect to the progression of the program.

Course relevancy is a different story in relation to the job market and real world situations. Mechs find themselves facing learning curves and it has less to do with the quality of education and more to do nature of Mechanical Engineering itself. The overall field is incredibly broad; it is next

to impossible for any Mech to know and to be skilled in everything that is necessary for a particular job.

UofT Engineering and Mech students alike try to reduce the knowledge gap.

The switching of APS106 from C++ to Python is an example of this. And it is not like employers are blind to the specific technical knowledge that is required for their

jobs. Most hiring companies look for employees with the ability to learn quickly, a skill that most UofT students gain within their time here. However, the bottom line remains: Mechanical Engineering courses can only teach so much information compared to what subsequent jobs require you to know.

MIE344 Ergonomic Design of Information Systems (how do you design an info system to work with a human?) remains an elective, despite the declining role of industrial engineers in

manufacturing plants and their rising roles in UI/UX design. Many of the core first year courses taught to industrial engineers also have no application beyond some background knowledge of

physics; ECE110, MIE100, and CIV100 have no related upper year courses, and some may wonder what purpose taking them serves.

Another aspect of curriculum relevancy is how

Industrial Engineering LU CHEN Cannon Editor-in-Chief Industrial engineering’s roots date back to the Industrial Revolution, where technology first started to mechanize traditional manual operations. Back in the day, the discipline was driven almost entirely by the need to increase efficiency of manufacturing operations. Indy has grown a lot in the past hundred years to encompass increasing efficiency in any process or system, which is why the field is also known as systems engineering. With such rapid growth, one might wonder: just how relevant is UofT’s industrial engineering curriculum to, well, industry?

All in all, the courses themselves do reflect the changing interests in industry. As of December 2015, the department replaced MIE468 Facilities Planning course with MIE465 Analytics in Action, signalling the move away from more historical industrial engineering topics like manufacturing to more up and coming ones, like data analytics and machine learning.

A few curriculum eccentricities do remain, however; MIE343 Ergonomics (which can be boiled down to how to sit in a desk and how to avoid heat stress) is still a core third year course while

An example of extraneous courses in first year industrial engineering. Credit: Ciel Emond

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MARCH 2017 the material is taught. Here is where the department falls a little short. The third year design course’s major project is to design a website using Java and JSP files.

While Java is a marketable skill to have, JSP definitely is not. Javascript, jQuery, AngularJS, and React are all web languages that are relevant today; why not use them to teach the same

concepts?

Additionally, students are told to use MATLAB and Minitab extensively in upper level courses. Both MATLAB and Minitab cost money; if you’re in academia that might not be a problem, but companies would definitely prefer the free and ubiquitous alternatives: Python and R. Lastly, the simulation course taught to third

year students focused on discrete event simulation, another remnant of the profession’s manufacturing past. A more useful simulation course would focus on Monte Carlo, dynamical system, and statistical system simulations, which are far more ubiquitous in the real world than discrete events.

Compared to other

industrial engineering programs in Canada, UofT’s is ahead of its peers. Waterloo’s systems engineering program requires their students to take thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, manufacturing, and facilities design, while skimping on the operations research and information engineering courses that UofT emphasizes. Both Queen’s and McMaster don’t

even have an industrial engineering program, while Ryerson and Concordia University (in Quebec) also emphasizes manufacturing and facilities design. I suppose there is a reason we’re considered to be the best engineering school in Canada.

academia, it is an expensive software that companies may not be willing to shell out money for. Excel VBA is found much more frequently in industry, and students who are now graduating will be at a mild disadvantage since they won’t be able to use such a crucial tool with as much ease as before.

Most of Chemical Engineering’s curriculum is also largely focused on

process design/engineering.

While chemical engineering traditionally is mostly process engineering, its use for current chemical engineering graduates is questionable. With the decline of the petroleum industry and an increasing need for sustainable energy and biotechnology, current chemical engineering graduates seem to be at a disadvantage. With minimal coding skills and

minimal background in biology/sustainability (unless students choose to bolster their degree with a minor), the graduates of today do not seem to be equipped with the skills to tackle the issues that the world is currently facing.

Chemical Engineering NAMYA SYAL Cannon Marketing Head The Department of Chemical Engineering considers itself to be finely tapped into student needs and the needs of the workplace. The department consistently makes changes each year based on student feedback. But just how relevant is the curriculum?

As of last year, students

are introduced in MATLAB in first year as opposed to second year. However, the second year component of MATLAB was still retained, perhaps because of the debatable success of the 1T9’s introduction to MATLAB. Additionally, numerical methods, which had an Excel VBA component, is now being taught in MATLAB. While MATLAB may be ubiquitous in

We’re Nothing but the Material We’re Made Of DANIEL BRLAS Cannon Contributor You would be hardpressed to find a time or place for philosophical speculation into your discipline or work at any point in your engineering career; philosophy and engineering are rarely closely associated.

Yet within the engineering department at UofT there are people willing to bridge the gap and apply their advanced technical knowledge to the theoretical.

Prof. Glenn Hibbard, Associate Undergraduate Chair of the Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) department, frequently opens discussion into the general conception of substance. In a recent lecture, Prof. Hibbard examined the brain through a firm materialist lens, as may be expectedly implicit in the

materials discipline. He described the brain as only the (more or less) physical interaction between neurons which go on to affect our ideas, reasoning, and action as human beings. This monist concept proposes that everything that goes on in our minds is a process completely contained within the brain.

While the notion may be ripe for intellectual discussion of ontology and metaphysics in and of itself, alas, the purpose of this article is not to argue nor analyse the exact statement, but rather expand the comparison into other parts of human existence. I put forward an attempt to broaden the notion and ask: what other comparisons can be drawn between life and material processes?

Depending on your viewpoint, an optimistic or

pessimistic view can be derived regarding purpose in life. The mere thought that everyone has a purpose, eventual or reoccurring, may be enough to sate most.

Perhaps the layman can be the essential bolt holding the structure, rarely noticed yet integral, carefully placed yet simple in design and execution. But the idea that there is a purpose implies it can be outlived, insignificant or, worse yet, missed. A function can just as easily not be met or never used entirely in any physical system; a beam for extra support to a bridge which is never used, or for a load which is never met may have been useful at some point, or stress may have broken the bridge anyhow.

This is not the only comparison skewed by outlook.

As you grow, the natural strain you experience hardens you. The stresses

you put up with as you mature make you stronger and you can handle more without buckling, but eventually you become brittle.

Disappointments crush your dreams and hope fades from your material mind, for some more than others.

You do not bend as easy to small problems in life and you no longer cry over spilt milk, but a load large enough will cause a critical crack to propagate catastrophically and you break under the tension.

And the most apt comparison follows: failure meets us at the end; we all die. Creep a material experiences slowly through its effective lifespan, while not necessarily the failure mode by itself, will eventually take its toll and make it easier for other failure modes to occur, just as natural death is not death in itself, but rather a

failure of the human system made easier through years of stress. Perhaps fatigue through an extreme load applied several times wears you down over the years.

This should be no stranger to an engineering student at UofT, as the stress you feel will no doubt shorten your life overall. For some, corrosion and fouling combine as drug use degrades your strength and appearance.

An impact from an object can fracture the material and cause it to fail.

All life seems to be is a collection of stresses which leave their imprints onto the mind and body. It is enough to inspire conniptions in any reasonable being, but as a collection of living materials it is important to maintain some composure and modesty and to remember that all of us fail in the end.

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ML continued from page 1 There are many concerns about how advances in automation, specifically in ML, are changing the job landscape. Many argue that ML will lead to the “singularity,” a term coined by John von Neumann to describe a future point in human history beyond which civilization will be forever changed by rapid advances in technology. Many predictions on how machine intelligence will change society are apocalyptic, describing a path where humanity has been entirely replaced by machines in the workforce.

To put these concepts into focus, let us see what role ML has in medical imaging today.

Nick Bryan, M.D., Ph.D., writing for the Radiological Society of North America, posed a question to explain the motivation behind employing ML in the medical industry: “Can a machine learn more than

MARCH 2017 what we now know and use this knowledge to make decisions?” He uses the definition made by Arthur Samuel in 1959, describing ML as “the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.”

According to Dr. Bryan, the decision-making tasks in radiology are mainly those of classification; a radiologist’s main task is to find the most likely diagnosis, given the available images and clinical information.

ML uses algorithms to make decisions. Some strategies include random forest classification, Bayesian networking, and genetic algorithms. No matter what the strategy, however, Dr. Bryant argues that an algorithm’s value to the radiologist depends on how accurately it makes a diagnosis.

Since radiologists are familiar with statistical metrics, the outcomes of algorithm performance can be easily understood.

Dr. Bryan describes

two general paradigms for designing ML algorithms: supervised and unsupervised learning. Supervised learning is a process where a radiologist teaches a machine, and the machine learns from what is known from inputs of imaging data with categorized outcomes.

Alternatively, unsupervised learning is a process where the machine determines what the possible diagnoses are and how to discriminate against them by cycling through large data sets (ie. “bid data”). While the first method has the potential to increase the throughput of diagnoses, the second could potentially lead to new information on what patterns can be used to diagnose an illness without the help of human professionals.

The marriage between ML and medical imaging is becoming irreversible.

In an editorial published in the Journal Pattern Recognition, Kenji Suzuki et al. describe how ML has become indispensable to

the field of medical imaging. Difficulties due to variations in the complexity in biomedical image, or in deriving analytical solutions to represent objects like lesions and anatomies in biological imaging data, are some of the many seemingly insurmountable challenges facing the imaging and diagnostic profession. They describe problems in medical imaging as requiring “learning from examples/ data for accurate representation of data and modeling of prior knowledge, which is exactly the focus of machine learning.”

A study by A. Alansary et al. leverage ML to tackle the challenges of imaging a fetus due to the variability in position and orientation.

They extract superpixels, a segment of an image which is in better alignment with intensity edges than a rectangular patch, to construct a graph. They trained a random forest classifier to tell the difference between brain and non-brain superpixels.

The method validation achieved a 94.55% accuracy rate of brain detection.

Dr. Bryan argues that when the success rate of the machine exceeds that of the human, it will have learned more than what a radiologist knows, giving it the ability to make decisions a human could not make. According to Bryan, this is not, however, the end of radiologists. Though machines are rapidly becoming capable of learning complex sets of data from large normal and diseased populations, he predicts that machines are destined to complement our human skills of pattern recognition.

Time will tell the what the long-term effect will be introducing machine learning into medicine. The capacity, however, of machine learning to advance the field of medical imaging is clear, and in a rapidly expanding industry it is likely to become an integral tool in the field of diagnostic medicine.

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Paving the Way for Women in Science and Engineering Women continued from page 1 Gender discrimination is often recognized and criticized only when it is blatantly obvious, but it is the more subtle bias that, when deeply embedded in the fabric of the global society, proves to be infinitely more persistent and infinitely more dangerous. “The only way we can achieve [more women in science] is from the bottom-up. We need to stop the systemic bias that starts so early in people’s lives. We need to get students interested in science and we need to get them to follow through with research,” says Professor Brenda McCabe, Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering. “By having more female professors, we get role models so [that female students] know that it’s not just men, we are a part of this.”

While sciences, particularly health and agriculture, have seen a rapid rise in female researchers, engineering has long been a field traditionally considered unsuitable for women. Even so, there was a rise in the proportion of female students coming to U

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Professor Brenda McCabe

Professor Amy Bilton

Credit: University of Toronto, Faculty of Engineering

of T Engineering. Changing societal perceptions would have been a strong contributor to that - seeing women as accomplished professionals in every discipline of engineering can be the motivation that many unsure students need to take this leap.

Moreover, there is now an increasing demand for skilled people in industries, offices and working sites. Professor McCabe elaborated on this changing trend: “Many employers understand the role that women play when they work with men. The workplace is a different and a better workplace.” Women offer a different perspective to the same problem – and

We need to stop the systemic bias that starts so early in people’s lives. We need to get students interested in science and we need to get them to follow through with research.

that in turn can ensure that we study the issue from many different angles.

“They challenge each other in different ways, they think differently and we come up with different and better solutions.”

Would female engineers have chosen a different career, if they could go back? “In part, I was driven towards the technical side. I have enjoyed the technical side, the thinking, the enthusiasm – with respect to being a professor; it is the best job in the world.

As researchers, we have the opportunity to do virtually anything we want to do. Did I do the right thing? Absolutely,” reflects Professor McCabe, who also previously worked in Land Surveying. Similarly, Professor Bilton, who is currently doing fieldwork with her students in Nicaragua, commented on her career: “Personally I have felt very little holding me back as a woman, but there have been a few challenges that I have experienced. I feel that these instances are not deliberate, but intrinsic gender balances still exist, in other fields as well.”

As the proportion of women in health, business, and law rises, it is disappointing to observe a painfully evident lack of women in engineering.

In Canada, despite more

Credit: ECO Studio

than half of the population consisting of women, less than 13% of all licensed engineers are female. The last decades have seen increasing funds and efforts poured into ensuring a high school curriculum that encourages more ‘technical’ subjects such as math and science among girls. While that has reaped a finite success in encouraging girls to enroll in engineering, it has not addressed another, more pressing concern.

A report by Harvard Business Review noted that on average, around 40% of women leave the engineering profession after graduation to pursue work in other fields. While the specific cause for this has not been determined, the high percentage has been attributed to a number of factors – most significantly that as female students pursue their degree, they have a number of opportunities to work with their peers or in a professional environment, as an intern, where they witness the implicit, and sometimes explicit, discrimination faced by women in a global society where their professionalism, technical judgement, and expertise is doubted.

Therefore, there is a need to invest in ensuring that female engineers are treated the same as their male

counterparts.

As for what advice they would give to young girls who aspire to follow a career in engineering, Professor Bilton concluded: “engineering can be an awesome career but it isn’t for everyone. If you like math, science and want to make a difference, engineering can be a great choice. Don’t be intimidated by the fact that it’s a male dominated field.”

Professor McCabe stressed the importance of keeping all our options open at all levels of study. “In high school, make sure that you don’t close the doors to your future by not keeping your sciences and your math.

Doing that closes doors and at that time, they don’t hear them closing. That easier path is not the right path.

The advice is the same for undergraduate students.

Work hard, enjoy what you are doing, stay balanced, and don’t close any doors.

You don’t know, five years down the road you might change your mind.”

Here’s to seeing more women in engineering: to seeing women becoming designers and project managers, contractors and inventors, professors and researchers, and having the opportunity to contribute to the scientific society to their greatest potential.

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The Secret Behind Cult-like Clubs There are a few clubs on campus that have what seems to be cult-like devotion. You know the type: members spend all their time either in the club, hanging with other members of the club, or talking about how great their club is. They seem to prioritize that club’s activities over everything else, including academics. The Cannon would like to know just what it is about these clubs that leads to such loyalty, and so we asked Skule Nite, Blue Sky Solar Racing, and Skule Choir about their culture and activities. A common theme threaded throughout all three clubs is that of family.

They don’t just meet up to work; members of the club genuinely care very much about each other and encourage each other to grow and improve, whether within or beyond the club’s activities.

Blue Sky Solar Racing ANDREW UDERIAN Cannon Senior Editor Blue Sky Solar Racing is one of the University of Toronto’s oldest design teams, having recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Despite setbacks throughout the years, the team continues to grow and succeed, having won 3rd place at the 2016 American Solar Challenge. The team is well-recognized throughout engineering for its signature trailer that can be seen being towed around campus, the work that often takes place in the alleyway between Wallberg and Sandford Fleming, and the sacrifices made in order to drive the project forward. According to Project Manager (PM) Frank Gu, the average team member spends approximately 25 hours weekly on the project, with hardcore team members committing as many as 80 hours during busy periods. Contributing to the project is challenging, with the team boasting a 5% long-term retention rate on new members, yet Blue Sky thrives from one race to the next.

According to Gu, no universal key exists for keeping team members committed, with the means of keeping the team together lying in the variety of projects available at Blue Sky. Speaking about his responsibilities as the PM of Blue Sky, he stated: “As a leader, it’s your job to identify what keeps your team members going and

Blue Sky Solar attended the Solar Canada Conference at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre with this car, named Horizon.

Credit: Blue Sky Solar Racing

to continue providing that experience for them. What makes one member want to be on the team can drive another away, and so you have to work with your people in order for your people to work with you.” Because the team offers numerous challenges, from business development to composite fabrication, the team also attracts a significant quantity and variety of students, both from engineering and arts and science.

In order to attract people, the team offers a variety of tasks and projects; however, it also attracts members through the challenge of the project. At first glance, it would appear that the quantity of work expected from dedicated members would put students off from joining, however Gu sees

the challenge in a positive light: “Yes, it’s an aggressive culture in so that we like to challenge people’s perception of their own limits, but in doing so we help each other break through them to create a unique engineering experience. We work hard, and we also party hard.”

When asked about partying, an aspect typically not present in traditional engineering teams, he responded, “Yes, we party. Blue Sky is a pretty tight-knit family that transcends the engineering work that we do.” By combining a variety of learning experiences with a fast pace and an aggressive culture, Blue Sky helps its members grow from the first day they join the team.

One challenge faced by any team made up of students is that of transitioning

from one generation of students to the next, and Blue Sky experiences it as well.

Many teams have specific procedures for transferring knowledge or expertise from one generation to the next, and most perform the process of transitioning in the weeks surrounding the handover. However, Blue Sky follows a broader, more general strategy, with Gu outlining the basics: “The process of transitioning begins on the first day of the cycle, and involves planting the seed of team culture into the members who make up the next generation and nurturing it into their own culture and knowledge. If you do this, by the time of the end of the cycle transitioning is natural and should occur without much difficulty.” For Blue Sky,

the process of transferring knowledge from old members to new ones is not a short term project, but a long-term trend taking place over months and years of time.

Being a member of Blue Sky Solar Racing is not easy, with the work expected of committed members and the fast pace of projects, and with Gu joking “Caffeine overdose is a risk inherent in being on the team, and we all put our GPAs up for adoption because we can’t raise them ourselves.”

However, by fostering a team culture that encourages achievement, and giving members an opportunity to grow, Blue Sky continues to drive solar racing forward with every car.

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Skule Nite HANNAH ENG Cannon Contributor If you have never heard of Skule Nite until now, chances are you’re living under a rock. Now in its 96th year of production, Skule Nite is not just a club, but an annual tradition here at the University of Toronto.

What has contributed to the long-standing success of this self-written-produced-andperformed, run-by-engineers-for-engineers musical sketch comedy? Well there in of itself lies the answer.

One would think engineering and theatre couldn’t be more separate, but for many people it’s a place where they can belt their favorite show tune parodied after their least favorite problem set.

Skule Nite 1T7 Producer Alex Perelgut and AssistantProducer Savannah Forrest gave some insight into the culture of this club. It’s about a nine month process from

Skule Choir ZHENGLIN LIU Cannon Senior Editor Skule Choir in its current incarnation was founded just last January, but it had previously existed under the leadership of Prof.

Malcolm McGrath of Civil Engineering, performing up till late in the last decade at least. The choir now rehearses weekly for two hours, with occasional extra rehearsals close to concerts, but more enthusiastic members have many ways to keep busy, be it learning solos on their own to perform at concerts, helping out with the logistics of rehearsal and performance, or just working on their technique to better deal with the challenges of our repertoire.

This past year, the retention rate has been encouraging, something like 70% at least. Members are probably

The Skule Nite 1T7 Cast Credit: William Ye brainstorming the show’s initial conception to the final curtain call. In between comes auditions and casting, musical scores to write and dances to choreograph, sets to build and lights and sound to sync up. For both Perelgut and Forrest, this is the fifth Skule Nite production they have been involved in; however, it did not seem like it would be their last.

There is quite the supply of Skule Nite Alumni or

“fossils,” as it would seem for a 96-year-old tradition.

As Perelgut states, “Fossils come back all the time...

We’ve got past directors, producers, choreographers, lighting, construction crew that come back to help out and give guidance to current members.”

Currently there’s about 70 members involved in this year’s Skule Nite, all with varying degrees of experience. As Perelgut and Forrest

encouraged to stay by the friendly and informal - even occasionally meme-filled atmosphere of the choir, and by genuine interest in vocal music (since we are, to my knowledge, the only UofT choir that one can easily fit in an engineering schedule and that welcomes singers of all levels). The tight-knit culture of the choir is particularly demonstrated by the time choir members spend together outside rehearsal, be it to play around with the music being rehearsed, to try out more challenging pieces for fun, or just to get bubble tea and hang out.

While the choir has not existed long enough to have the issue of many members graduating, the graduate students and non-UofT students we count among our membership give us reason to be optimistic. As well, performances at Frosh Week and other events, along with word of mouth and typical promotional materials such

as posters, are a number of ways we can attract interested singers.

Since the main responsibility of choir members is just to attend rehearsals and performances, not all that many sacrifices are usually needed, though singers do have to be ready to miss out on other interesting weeknight events run by other groups. When performances approach though, members might have to commute up to campus just for added rehearsal on weekends or help with concert publicity. As well, members* who are part of other musical groups might find themselves singing continuously for more than four hours on rehearsal nights, and more than 10 hours a week, a rather grueling amount for non-musicians.

For some members, the entire experience of singing in a choir is new, but despite this a number of them have grown to be able

share: “We’ve got cast members who have been dancing and singing for years…tech members who know how to work lights and sound boards. But we also get people who don’t normally sing or dance, tech people who’ve never touched a light in their life but they’re eager to learn. The only exception are musicians. They have to come not just competent in playing their instrument, but also in being able to

sight read really well.”

Despite both alumni and current members being involved, there’s still a hefty time commitment. Director and producers put in 20+ hours a week, cast members a minimum of 16, crew and tech between 6-10, and musicians around 2-3 hours.

After five years of running the gauntlet, Perelgut and Forrest are used to balancing out this schedule. Both point out, however, that Skule Nite is pretty much their sole extracurricular.

But it doesn’t seem like they would want it any other way. “[The Skule Nite community] is so unique,” states Forrest, “there’s nothing else like this out there. Theatre and engineers.” (As if to prove her point, some cast members came out singing a song from the musical ‘Wicked’ while others enthusiastically marched to the tune ). “We’re definitely a family.”

Skule Choir performing. Credit: Clement Ho to contribute enormously as members. I, personally, have been in choirs for more than five years before founding Skule Choir, and most of the other executives have also had choral experience. While some of us have had experience as section leaders, running a choir is new for all of us. Logistics have proven occasionally challenging, and choosing repertoire is a privilege that comes with many responsibilities, but the experience

is very rewarding. As well, the musical traditions we come from are quite diverse, ranging from the Canadian Children’s Opera Company to the Anglican choral tradition, and from contemporary classical concert choirs to musical theatre, so our style of choral singing can be new even for some experienced singers in the group. *That is, me.

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FOOD

Toronto Through Food NAMYA SYAL Cannon Marketing Head

(From top to bottom) 1. Hong Shing, 195 Dundas St W. Credit: Hong Shing

2. Vivoli, 665 College St

Credit: Taste of Little Italy

3. Sher-e-Punjab, 351 Danforth Ave Credit: blogTO

4.Prairie Girl Bakery, 150 Bloor St W. Credit: Roseanne Dela Rosa

For the final issue of the year, I wanted to do something different with this column. I’ve written about the best places to get burritos, cheap eats, and decadent dinners, but this time I’ll be examining my relationship with Toronto through the food that I eat.

Food and Toronto have both led me to some of my lowest lows, but have also helped me pull myself out of those slumps. While seeking new foods (or sometimes just sustenance), I discovered Toronto. Here are some of the places that I have very fond memories of. They may not have 5 star ratings, but that’s not all that food is about.

We’ll start off with where my affair with food in this city started: Hong Shing. A mere 3-minute walk from Chestnut, there is something almost charming about this place. The ambience is nothing special, and a friend often jokes that it is a cover for the Chinese mafia. Despite its somewhat sketchy atmosphere, it’s hard to forget all those midnight meals I shared with friends over a drink. Their food is as good as un-authentic authentic Chinese can get. I for one enjoy being able to eat a decent full meal for under $10 and getting a fortune cookie at the end of it.

Hong Shing holds a special place in the hearts of those who have lived in Chestnut, and of those who frequent it often. Its popularity is not limited to just UofT students: the place celebrated its twentieth anniversary recently, and

the event’s popularity was quite something for a small, shady-looking restaurant.

Hong Shing showed me that all I needed for a good time were a couple of friends, crispy fried tofu, and Sriracha.

While I frequented many places like Hong Shing along Dundas during my first year, none of them screamed “Toronto” to me, despite some of them being among my favorite restaurants in the city. However, once I started venturing beyond Dundas, I found a whole new town, starting with Little Italy.

On Halloween night, some friends and I got lost in Little Italy on the way to a kegger. We never made it there, but I did end up with some amazing gnocchi. It warmed my heart in a way that I had been craving in my new home. This little place was Vivoli, a quaint Italian joint on College and Beatrice. The food wasn’t exactly cheap ($15 for my plate), but that plate of gnocchi satisfied a part of me that I didn’t realize was there. Vivoli not only is an excellent venue to host small parties, but they also have a great bar. They have a lovely patio as well during the summer months, and it’s a cute place to have a date when you’re not looking to spend too much but just want to enjoy some good food with your boo.

Vivoli showed me that even in the coldest of winters, I would always be able to find some warmth. I saw my first snowfall that night, and it was magical.

I grew more and more comfortable with the city as time went on, but I still couldn’t find a restaurant in the city that made food like my mama did. I tried several places, and each time there was only disappointment. I had almost started to believe that I wouldn’t be able to find a piece of home in the city. But this

Diwali, when I was feeling particularly homesick and had forgotten to make any reservations beforehand, I found Sher-e-Punjab (“The Lion of Punjab”) in Greektown, of all places.

Finding this restaurant on a rather difficult day for me (even though it is almost 30 minutes away) was like seeing a mirage. I could not believe that an authentic Indian restaurant had made its way to Toronto, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it truly was an oasis and not just a mirage upon going there. The food there is perfectly spiced; even my non-Indian friends seemed to enjoy it. It’s again a little expensive (a bill for two will be about $50) but the quantities are ample, and the ambience is great. They have small touches of ‘India’ around the restaurant in the form of posters, Air India advertisements, and so on.

The best part? Their butter chicken isn’t sweet! Sher-ePunjab reminded me that home was always near me; I just needed to find it.

And now to end off with something sweet, and in the fanciest area of Toronto – Yorkville. Close to Victoria College and Yorkville is a cute little dessert place called Prairie Girl Bakery. It’s run by a lovely young woman and the cupcakes are quite a delight. I discovered this place after a friend insisted we have a little treat after last year’s Skule Nite show.

The cupcakes are reasonably priced, they have all your favorite flavours, and there’s some space inside to enjoy your treat. Go early though, since they run out quickly! Prairie Girl reminded me to always remember to have fun and relax, and that Toronto was a town of surprises: even near Yorkville could one find affordable yet amazing desserts in a modest-looking bakery.

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Reading Week Adventures!

ICELAND Dale Gottlieb

MEXICO Hannah Bendig

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PARIS Aidan Jappy

CAPE CANERVAL Rick Liu

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More Reading Week Adventures!!

ITALY AND HUNGARY Connor Lawless

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Nepotism in Skule ANONYMOUS Cannon Contributor Every year during Frosh Week, the first years are introduced to a seemingly beautiful and welcoming community. A community where you are told, “it’s okay to be who you are.”

The three pillars of student life are introduced – the Cannon, the Lady Godiva Memorial Bnad, and the ever elusive BFC. The Cannon mystifies, the Bnad aggravates and amuses, and the BFC excites. I personally was thrilled to be a part of this amazing community which was apparently very inclusive! But I should’ve started seeing the holes in the inclusivity, starting on just the second day of Frosh Week.

That day, some frosh (only the more “hype” ones) received mysterious cards that told them to meet at a predetermined location and time, where they were introduced to the BFC. The events of that night concluded with a sign-up to join the frosh mailing list. As the year went on, I noticed the number of frosh attending pranks dwindling, but there were a few students who would always remain until the very end of each build.

The following year, I was surprised to learn that the individuals who worked away till the crack of dawn at these pranks had not even made it on the mailing list, while others, who had arguably not put in as much time and effort, were now ministers. This year, I noticed something even more worrying: the number of events that frosh were invited to had decreased tremendously. Most events were by invitation only, and the criteria for receiving an invitation were extremely vague.

Perhaps these are the issues that come with a secret society. The Cannon Guard

suffered from similar issues as well; guard training used to be invitation only, until this year’s Chief realized that wasn’t a fair way to do things. After all, s/he could not know everyone who had an interest in protecting the Skule mascot. However, there still exists a lot of ambiguity as to what it takes to become Chief and one of the trusted guards, or LTs, as they are called. The selection process is never clearly defined, and the response to requests for clarification is always, “just be involved and Chief will notice you.”

While the Cannon and the BFC’s lack of transparency and accountability may be attributed to their need for secrecy and safety, the leaders (or “leedurs” as they choose to call themselves) of the Bnad don’t seem to be selected according to any concrete criteria either. The Bnad Leedurs claim to choose their successors based on musical talent, leadership qualities, and involvement, but Bnad Leedurs in the past arguably have been chosen without meeting any of these criteria. Recently there have been leedurs who have barely made it out to Bnad events chosen over those who go religiously. While some may enjoy the ‘frat house’ environment of the Bnad, most frosh (and even upper years) are intimidated by it, and that can be seen in the dwindling number of frosh coming out to Bnad events.

Furthermore, the criterion that leedurs should have musical talent calls their slogan into question: “everyone is welcome, regardless of musical ability.”

It’s understandable that the Bnad Leedur should have some degree of musical talent, since it is a band and someone has to be able to carry a tune. But the Bnad is first and foremost a

spirit group; the most critical question when it comes to choosing more senior roles should be “who would create a welcoming environment for frosh?” Moreover, the Bnad should be helping members interested in becoming a Leedur develop said musical skills, instead of choosing someone based solely on a skill that can be picked up with a reasonable amount of effort over the winter and summer, when events are far and few in between. It was thus quite apt when a former Bnad Leedur mockingly put up a Project Director nomination sheet on the door of the Bnad room.

wasn’t actually enough to get them in. “Yeah, you got in because you’re best buds with one of the people in it,” remarked one individual, followed by a solemn nod from another. Skule is full of stories like these, be they about the Bnad Leedur, Project Directorship Committees, or EngSoc Board of Director positions.

Most Skuligans seem to be full of malaise, but those in charge fail to recognize that due to a lack of similar experiences.

Bnad Leedurs, Chiefs, Mario and his ministers all end up coming from the same group of people. Skule is unfortunately somewhat

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Skule is not inclusive and I wish it would stop masquerading as such.

The lack of inclusivity is not limited to the Trinity.

EngSoc and Blue & Gold have had their fair share of problems as well. When EngSoc elections came around, I witnessed students with excellent platforms and ideas lose to those who were a bit more popular. I noticed a similar (and to an extent more worrying) trend with the Blue & Gold chairs; the attendees of election night (a Friday night towards the end of the semester) are mostly those who attend SUDS, and these individuals tend to belong to the same general group of friends.

Once I started to look for it, I realized a lot of people had similar stories to tell.

Leaders who had helped me around in first year and who I was positive were part of the BFC told me how their efforts and involvement over the last four years somehow

of a circle-jerk. The individuals who get involved in first year are the only ones who stay involved throughout, and it’s extremely difficult for new people to assimilate, unless one plays by the rules and befriends the core group of people. Merit, hard work, and ironically “involvement” seem to have little place in this community. For this very reason, sometimes even those who do get involved in first year don’t remain involved. The problem is a bit bigger than nepotism though, considering that friendship is usually based on shared experiences and backgrounds. This excludes a large group of people, such as those who didn’t go to high school in Canada. While the odd introvert does get included, upon speaking to them one realizes that they just “knew a person,” or had worked

extremely hard to overcome the more inhibited parts of their personality.

Skule needs to become aware of its faults before it can start fixing them. If Skuligans keep on insisting that Skule is an equitable place but keep on disregarding the differences of those from different backgrounds, or with different personalities, Skule will never become more inclusive. The “Equity and Inclusivity” directorship is the start of acknowledging that something is broken, but the three months that it took to review and accept the creation of this directorship indicate bigger problems.

Creating directorships like these is futile if community members and especially the Board of Directors fail to accept that there is a problem.

People fear losing Skule traditions and culture, but for a culture based on exclusivity, the time is ripe for change.

Skule is not inclusive and I wish it would stop masquerading as such. It is rotten with exclusion and bias, and little is being done to fix it. What EngSoc and the other ex-officios fail to realize is that most general members don’t care about them. EngSoc elections are poorly attended (and the voter turnout speaks to this fact: last year, only 7.5% of eligible voters casted a ballot for President), and that is because people do not see Skule as a place of equal opportunity. In contrast, design teams thrive because they are based on what engineers understand best: merit. Skule leaders need to take a lesson from this, and make an active effort to be more inclusive: to collaborate with groups often left out, to understand their own bias, and to find ways to tackle their conflicts of interest.

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Credit: Rafael Araujo

Are We Due For Another Renaissance?

MARGUERITE TUER-SIPOS Cannon Contributor I would argue that today, most people who deem themselves engineers would not think to consider themselves artists, and similarly, most artists would not consider themselves engineers.

We understand these titles as having strict guidelines based on education that precedes them and the futures they might lead to, yet the intersection of these fields was not always such a foreign concept. During the Renaissance the existence of an “engineer-artist” was common and can be characterized by Leonardo da Vinci.

When you type “Leonardo da Vinci” into Google, the first two sets of results that are suggested are “inventor” and “painter,” hinting at his equal fame for both pursuits. As discussed

by Francis Moon, da Vinci’s contributions to painting

are no more and no less celebrated and studied than his contributions to engineering and design. His mastery over these two systems of knowledge is evidence of his genius and can be quantified through his obsession with geometry. Theodore Cook notes in his book, “Curves of Life”, that da Vinci’s meticulous attention to geometrical details and patterns in nature allowed him incredible insight into the patterns necessary to succeed at both painting and design.

By understanding the relational qualities of items within nature, paired with their inherent need to create patterns, da Vinci created a system for representing nature and applied this system to his technological designs.

Through the intertwining of these visual systems, da Vinci’s painting and designing benefitted by developing in tandem. It’s not difficult to prove that da Vinci was a genius in both visual and

technical representations as it is a widely accepted opinion, nor is it particularly difficult to prove that these systems of knowledge developed simultaneously. What I find interesting is how he acts as a prodigy in both these fields without contest, even by today’s strict standards, as demonstrated in Martin Kemp’s studies on him. His achievements in engineering are never tainted by his title as an artist; likewise his status as an artist is never dimmed by his pursuits in engineering.

Instead of being cast into one stream, as is the norm today, da Vinci’s knowledge flowed freely between art and science, allowing his achievement of a level of genius matched by very few.

From da Vinci’s success, the question of both when and why we began to categorize students and people into the fields of either “arts” or “engineering” arises.

As with any phenomena,

the separation of art and engineering, following their coexistence during the Renaissance, has evolved for hundreds of years. Since the late 18th and 19th century saw the industrial revolution and in turn a period of rapid technological advance, it is a natural place to look for this separation. In his essay “The Exhibitionary Complex”, Tony Bennett explores the new need for categorizing art, natural science, and man-made technology in response to the mental space technology was now utilizing. These categories were reflected in the founding of museums that partitioned their space based on systems of knowledge.

Jeffrey Abt notes in his essay, “The Origins of the Public Museum”, that with the founding of art museums, technology museums, and natural history museums as separate entities, the categorization of the systems of knowledge was suddenly

institutionalized.

Unlike the heterogeneous space for classically artistic or classically scientific items to coexist during the Renaissance, these items were now more separate than ever through their existence in physically different parts of one city system.

This led to the new phenomenon of the public choosing which system of knowledge they would spend their money on by picking a museum to attend. I think this choice of the public’s attendance of museums during the 19th century is echoed in the complicated funding of today’s public education system. The decision of which subject in the public school system receives more funding is essentially the same decision that a museum-goer of the 19th century faced: which is more worth my money?

Art continued on page 18

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WHAT GRINDS MY GEARS

What Grinds My Gears: The Wankel Engine DALE GOTTLIEB Cannon Senior Editor Finally, I will write a ‘What Grinds My Gears’ article about something that actually contains gears.

To me, the rotary engine is one of the greatest symbols of annoying physical limitations imposed on engineering designs. You can’t always create the ideal design, and are always limited by manufacturing techniques and currently implemented technologies. Sometimes, the industry is forced to follow the steps of giants rather than possibly finding great innovations.

Nearly all modern car engines are based on the reciprocating engine or piston engine design. In these engines, gas combustion is used to drive a piston connected to a crankshaft to provide power to the car.

There’s one major flaw in this design which we should all be able to see right away: after the piston is pushed by the expanding gas, it needs to stop, accelerate back to the top of the cylinder pushing the gas out, stop,

“

accelerate back down as gas is being put back into the cylinder, stop, and then accelerate back up to repeat the cycle. This requires the piston to accelerate from a stopped position back to full speed 4 times per cycle.

It doesn’t take a mechanical engineer to know that accelerating objects is not very efficient, let alone 4000 times a minute. It also doesn’t take a mechanical engineer to accept that the overwhelming use of piston engines probably implies they’re the ideal choice for car engines, but what would be the more obvious choice?

Imagine an engine where no part needs to stop during its cycle. The Wankel engine achieves this by using a three-sided rotor inside the engine housing, which rotates around the drivetrain.

With the rotor constantly moving inside the housing, it is able to accomplish compressing, igniting, and ejecting the fuel without stopping. This continuous cycle should make the rotary engine more efficient, since no part needs to accelerate on each cycle. The Wankel

The Wankel engine is a great case study on how history has dictated the shape of the modern world. We can never predict what would come of the Wankel engine if it had the $500 million budget that Honda puts into its new engine design.

engine is a viable choice for small automobiles, and is currently used in the Mazda RX-8, but no other major brand of cars has this design in any of their flagship vehicles.

The reason seems counterintuitive. Despite the rotary engine having a more efficient four-stroke design than the piston engine, it actually gets far poorer fuel economy. Fuel does not combust as efficiently while moving around in an engine, preferring the environment created by a piston stopped at the apex of its stroke. The design of the combustion chamber in a rotary engine is also less efficient at transferring the energy from fuel combustion to the rotor than in a piston engine, and often leaves unburnt fuel being ejected.

The limits of fuel combustion are limits set by physics which are hardly the engineer’s fault. We can’t make fuel combust more efficiently while in motion, or change the way moments work, but we can change some of the more major problems with the design.

One of the largest flaws is that as the rotor heats up, the temperature differential between the rotor and the engine housing cause fuel and other lubricants to leak from the engine, a problem reminiscent of old jet engines.

My personal favourite problem with Wankel engines is the lack of a solid connection between the rotor and the drivetrain in the car. This lack of proper connection leads to literally grinded gears and wear and tear in the engine. Mix this with leaking lubricants, and it’s no wonder that the rotary engine was forced to lose to the piston engine historically.

I chose this topic as something that grinds my

Felix Wankel, inventor of the Wankel engine, with the Wankel engine

Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica

gears for two main reasons.

First of all, it really grinds my gears that the obvious engine design is actually worse than the counter-intuitive design. The second reason it bothers me is that there isn’t more research going into this design. I feel that the majority of the problems with this engine design directly relate back to engineering problems which have been overcome in other systems. For one thing, there must be better materials which would not expand enough through the temperature difference to cause fluids to leak out of the engine. If materials engineers could create turbine blades to survive the environment of the jet engine, we can design a better Wankel engine. With that simple solution, nearly all other problems with the engine are solved.

The Wankel engine is a great case study on how

history has dictated the shape of the modern world.

We can never predict what would come of the Wankel engine if it had the $500 million budget that Honda puts into its new engine design. The piston engine has received developments like fuel injection and piston shut-off while the Wankel engine has remained largely the same. It’s hard to imagine what other parts of our lives only exist because of off-shoot inventions. The modern computer may have never existed if it weren’t for Apple designing the home computer. Similarly, the modern car may have not existed without the design of the piston engine. Or is it possible that the modern car is being held back by the design of the modern engine? We will never find out for sure, and that is what grinds my gears.

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Breadth Requirements: Broadening or Restricting?

Against: LU CHEN Cannon Editor-in-Chief The logic behind breadth requirements makes sense.

Engineers who can’t communicate their ideas, who don’t know how to relate to other people outside of their field, and who can’t work with others are worthless in the real world. While being well-rounded sounds good in theory, the way that these requirements are implemented turn what should be enlightening education into a complete waste of time.

The problem is that in practice, the courses we’re able to take for these breadth requirements are very limited in scope (or have nothing to add in value), and it hinders our ability to take courses that we’re interested in because they don’t count towards those accreditation hours. It’s important to note that the breadth requirements I’m referring to are the NS/CS/HSS courses that we need to take to finish our degree.

The accreditation board mandates that all aspiring engineers take 195 hours’

Art continued from page 16 The differing public approval of the subjects of art and engineering has created the inequality of their treatment in the public school system. It is no secret that the arts in Ontario public schools are notoriously underfunded, with endless studies and statistics as proof. In his study, “The State of the Art and Music Education in Ontario Elementary School” from 2001, Dr. Rodger J. Beatty discovered only 33% of public schools in urban or suburban regions have

worth of natural sciences, which must “include elements of physics and chemistry.” While I understand the need to understand the science behind the applied sciences, the way we learn natural sciences should be through an introduction to what it is, followed by how we should apply it (which is what we do in courses like MIE100 and CIV100). 195 hours seems a little unnecessary (it’s around 3 half year courses if each course has 5 hours a week).

When you force engineering students to take a natural science elective, chances are they’re wasting time on a course they’re never going to remember or use again.

It’s not because students find science boring; it’s because the science courses we are able to take are introductory courses (since we don’t have the prerequisites for more interesting higher level courses), and those intro courses are extremely limited in subject matter because of overlapping material that we already take in our first few years. Additionally, these science courses often

emphasize knowledge over problem solving, so we’re not gaining anything other than very limited domain knowledge.

Half my class took CIV220 because they heard it was a bird course that could fulfill the requirement; when I asked 4 of them what they learned from the course one week after the final exam, the only response I got was an ‘idk.’ There’s no value in taking a separate natural science course when our options are so limited; why not embed it within the courses where we’re using the actual applications of those sciences in the first two years?

The CEAB also mandates 225 hours’ worth of ‘complementary studies,’ which are deemed to be humanities, social sciences, arts, management, engineering economics and communications. While these electives sound like the perfect opportunity to broaden our horizons and learn more about the world, the reality is far less sunny. Due to our lack of prerequisites, we’re limited to taking intro courses that don’t add much

value and end up being ‘bird’ courses that students take just to pad their GPA and fill a requirement. If the focus is on improving our communication skills, then that can easily be done by adding written assessments in our core courses (which are already done in third and fourth year design courses).

Breadth requirements in practice devolve into an enormous waste of time that could have been spent taking courses that truly complement and enrich our understanding of engineering material. As an industrial engineering student, I’ve been exposed to many applications of statistics (like forecasting and analytics) through my program’s courses. But if I want to take some stats courses that give me more background into the theory behind some of those forecasting equations or the models behind common analytics algorithms, I have to overload them because they technically don’t count towards my degree, while I take courses like Intro to Immunology and Renaissance Culture

to fulfill those ridiculous requirements.

I propose that instead of forcing engineers to take courses only to fulfill breadth requirements, the first two years should be designed so that the majority of the natural sciences/ complementary studies is covered, and that there is better transferability so that we can take more interesting higher-level science courses if we want to. Students should be able to come up with their own plan and take responsibility in seeing if the courses they take fulfill CEAB requirements. This way, you don’t have students wasting their time learning useless information while struggling to make time for courses they want to take but can’t due to taking the degree-fulfilling courses. This would require each course to have the CEAB credits it could fulfill, which might be too much to ask from the engineering faculty that we pay $16k a year to.

a full-time music teacher, while that number drops to 15% in rural areas. Of these elementary schools, only 15% have a specialist visual arts teacher and only 9% have a specialist drama teacher, meaning most arts teachers in Ontario are not trained in their subject at a higher level. This should raise the question as to how these teachers will inspire their students to pursue the arts in high school, let alone in higher education; the simplest answer is they are not. The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada found in their 2011 study on higher education

that enrolment in the humanities at Ontario universities has failed to see the growth that engineering and the sciences has experienced since 1998. At the master’s level, the most popular areas of study are business, engineering, law, and architecture which have seen an increase in enrolment of 75% between 1998 and 2008.

Evidently the separation we have seen between art and engineering/science has led to a system in which one is favoured over the other; however, that does not mean educators have skipped a beat in proclaiming “creativity” as an integral part

of education. While the arts are being left behind and the sciences are growing rapidly, the necessity for creativity is still rampant, often being listed as one of the top ten qualities for an engineer today online. For me, it seems like a double edged sword to limit a student’s exposure to the arts, yet demand that same student’s creativity in engineering.

Without the intersection of art and engineering in schools there is no need for a student of science to learn about the intricacies of the arts. While that may not seem important for the student, or the education

system, it is hard to ignore da Vinci’s participation and subsequent mastery of both subjects. In his exploration of nature da Vinci was able to apply the patterns he studied to both his art and his engineering design, allowing them to evolve as artefacts of each other. This leaves the question of whether the engineering solutions today are really the most creative. Or instead, whether our manufactured need to separate art from science is inhibiting the great minds of today from reaching the full “creative” potential that is so desperately desired.

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For: DALE GOTTLIEB Cannon Senior Editor The logic behind breadth requirements makes lots of sense: to broaden and develop our understanding of engineering and the world around us. We never know what we’re going to pursue, and it’s important to know a little about every field of engineering, not just your own. Beyond that, in industry, we need communication skills which engineering departments are not capable of fulfilling.

When we’re forced to take natural science electives, we’re not learning about the topic taught in the class. Instead, we’re learning how to look at problems and solve them on a fundamental level, which is what engineering is all about. As a materials engineer, the premise of my degree could be to look up values in tables to optimize a steel plant. I could easily go out into the industry and get a job where I refer to a table and ensure the steel being produced is up to spec.

But that’s not what I’m going to be doing. Chances are, I’ll be hired by a steel plant to come in and solve a problem which no one knows the solution to.

Beyond that, no one has even started on working out a solution to the problem.

I’ll need to understand basic thermodynamics and heat transfer to formulate a solution.

There’s also a chance that I won’t go to work in the steel industry at all. I’m planning to go into optics myself, which has nothing to do with materials engineering.

Recently, I’ve been presented a problem in the field and although I don’t have the necessary background in optics, I do have an understanding of mechanics and differential equations.

By using these very simple concepts, I’m able to read research papers in the field of optics and understand what’s being discussed, and am able to solve any problem presented to me.

I also believe ‘complementary studies’ courses are an essential part to an

engineer’s education. It’s easy to say they’re useless, but they were implemented in response to a lack of communication skills by graduating engineers. The skillset to type up a great email is the same skillset it takes to whip up a great essay, and it’s easy to imagine that going four years without writing anything would stop you from ever proofreading. It feels like the courses are useless because you don’t directly see the benefit in writing an essay, but it was probably some arts and science student who read our reports two decades ago that decided we needed better writing skills.

When you fulfill your breadth requirements, you shouldn’t go for the easiest option; you should take classes that you’d find intellectually stimulating. One of the best courses I’ve ever taken was HPS202, technology in the modern world.

It was hard as hell and it lowered my GPA substantially, but I’m happy I took it. It still allows me to strike up conversations about the

development of electricity or the railroad network in Europe. I’ve also come to believe that the door is the greatest invention of the modern era, and that without it all of society would collapse!

So am I happy that I need to take breadth requirements? No. I’d much rather take a class on steelmaking or optics than waste my time in basic thermodynamics and philosophy classes. But do I think breadth requirements are an opportunity that students take for granted? Yes. When I ask my sister what x is when x/5=3 and she’s not able to answer, I appreciate the education I’m getting.

We spend so much time as engineers doing schoolwork that we don’t realize the connections we’re making and the knowledge we have that others don’t. You might find breaking a problem down to smaller components easy now, but that’s only because you have 195 hours of practice doing it.

When you fulfill your breadth requirements, you shouldn’t go for the easiest option; you should take classes that you’d find intellectually stimulating.

WHAT’S GOING ON IN SKULE?

Certificate in Forensic Engineering

HANNAH BENDIG Cannon Contributor In 2011, UofT Professor Doug Perovic started teaching the first-of-its-kind forensic engineering course in Canada. 6 years later, it has now developed into something much bigger.

Engineering students can now earn a Certificate in Forensic Engineering, another big step for the university and the engineering community.

What exactly is forensic engineering? The field has

evolved a lot since its inception in investigating railroad accidents. Forensic engineering now investigates components in anything from surgical implants to athletic equipment. The field is applicable in product development, manufacturing, process control, and research. When a product fails for no obvious reason, techniques like scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy-dispersive X‑ray spectroscopy (EDX) can uncover pre-existing hidden chemicals that have left

traces on the fracture or adjacent surfaces. Other forms of testing include spectroscopy (infrared, ultraviolet, and nuclear magnetic resonance) and radiography using X-rays.

The forensic engineering certificate will allow students and future engineers to solve problems using logic and by applying their knowledge of legal proceedings. At the same time, students will be taught to interpret results from advanced lab equipment from the Ontario Centre

for the Characterization of Advanced Materials (OCCAM), jointly operated by the Materials Science & Engineering and Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry departments.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this certificate is only for MSE or Chem students. There are so many opportunities out there that anybody and everybody who is interested should take part in the certificate.

Because of our technical training and our ability to solve problems, any

engineer has the potential to work in forensic engineering. As engineers, our reputation as experts is on the line every time we give our testimony as expert witnesses. This why the Forensic Engineering Certificate is such an advantage for students. It will benefit you by giving you a look into the forensic engineering world before you are actually immersed in it. Ultimately, it will provide you with real life scenarios and steps to a solution that will be critical in the field.

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Journalism in Science: A Rhetorical Analysis SAM PENNER Cannon Senior Editor LU CHEN Cannon Editor-in-Chief

Whether intended or not, the act of reporting provides a point of view which can potentially influence the message received by the audience; scientific journalism is especially susceptible due to the complex nature of the subject matter.

What message the audience receives from the reporting of scientific finds can be influenced by factors like word usage, structure, use of narrative, and speaking to larger cultural contexts to paint a message for the reader.

Researchers at the University of Ottawa published a paper in late 2016 called ‘Age and sex differences in immune response following LPS treatment in mice.’ The study explored differences in immune responses exhibited in mice as a function of age and sex after exposing the mice to LPS, an endotoxin that binds to immune cells and triggers the aforementioned immune response. Its findings were that male mice display more sickness behavior and greater fluctuations in body temperature following LPS treatment than female mice, adult male mice display more sickness behavior than pubertal male mice, and that gonadectomy didn’t eliminate sex differences in immune responses.

Two newspaper articles were written about the paper: one by Times Magazine, and one by Metro News. We thought it might be interesting to compare how the two different news outlets reported on the scientific study and whether or not they accurately portrayed the study’s results. Though our analyses attempt to be objective, keep in mind that there is always a bias, intentional or not.

Times’ main demographic is the educated, middle class; the median age of their readers is 50, the median household income is $74,981, and 73.8% have attended/graduated college.

Their article was authored

by Amanda MacMillan, a health writer who majored in journalism/science writing and minored in physics.

The Times article, at first glance, seems to be a very credible and well-researched piece on how illness affects men and women differently.

The author references five different studies throughout the article, asks a subject-matter expert (Sabra Klein) who has no affiliation with the mouse study (so the article isn’t coloured by the biases of the mouse study), and includes various disclaimers like “studies done in lab animals do not necessarily apply to humans, so this research should be taken with a large grain of salt,” and “the scientific evidence for [man-flu] is far from conclusive.” The article is written as an objective summary of all the findings on ‘man-flu,’ and doesn’t seem to have any bias.

However, if we take a look at all the studies that are referenced, we notice that all of them support the idea that men are more affected by illness than women. There are no studies mentioned that disprove this notion, though they exist. Additionally, her implicit viewpoint, that

man-flu does exist, is built on flawed arguments that seem perfectly reasonable at the outset.

Her first argument for why man-flu exists is that research has shown male immune cell receptors to be more active than female immune cells, which causes a stronger immune response (the immune response is what causes us to feel ill) in males. She then uses the mouse study (“male mice displayed more symptoms of sickness than females when they were exposed to bacteria that cause an illness with symptoms similar to the flu”) and Klein’s study (“Klein’s 2015 study on human cells, for example, found that estrogen-based compounds made it harder for a flu virus to infect the samples”) as evidence.

Essentially, she’s presenting the study about a mouse’s reaction to an LPS receptor pathway (a receptor for bacteria which has nothing to do with the flu), and says that this is applicable to humans because Klein, the subject matter expert, said that other “studies with human cells—as well as in mice—show that male immune cells have more active receptors for certain pathogens.” It’s important to note that the LPS receptor was not specifically mentioned, just ‘certain pathogens,’ so the logic linking the mouse’s reaction

to that of a human immune system is tenuous at best.

Additionally, the specific study (Klein’s 2015 study) the author references on human cells is on compounds that encumber flu viruses; again, the flu virus has absolutely nothing to do with LPS receptors.

Her second supporting point is that “men have evolved to have weaker immune systems and lower immunity because of their tendency for risk-taking behaviors,” directly contradicting her first argument that male immune cells have a stronger immune response than female cells. If men have a stronger immune response, they do not have weaker immune systems.

The research itself may give contradicting explanations, which is fine, but the author uses this study as additional evidence to her first argument. Her third point, that “other research suggests that because women more easily pass pathogens onto their children, they’ve built up more natural defenses against them,” also contradicts her first argument.

Overall, the author cobbled together a bunch of different studies that investigated different hypotheses, different pathogens (viruses and bacteria), different immunological responses, and different species, and uses all of them to support her viewpoint that men are more affected by illnesses

than women. Though the thesis is never stated explicitly in the article (except for in the title, which may be misconstrued as it is worded ambiguously), the manner in which the author has presented the studies leads readers to conclude that men are more affected by illness.

This article plays on the fact that Times’ readers are generally well-educated people who expect good logic and lots of sources. It appears this way on the surface, but the arguments are flawed and it’s hard to see how they are flawed unless you read the specific studies the author references. This just goes to show how important it is to read critically, no matter how credible the article and author may seem at first glance.

Metro’s articles are tailored more for the general public. Their free daily print issues can be found on the subway and their reporters “tell the stories of the people who work, move about and enjoy the cities we live in.”

This vision is reflected in their staff as well; the Metro article was written by Adam Kveton, a writer for stories centred around the Ottawa region.

Journalism continued on page 22

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Why Men Are Much Worse At Being Sick Than Women - Times Magazine In the debate over which is the stronger sex, the so-called “man flu” inevitably comes up. It’s a popular theory that men get sicker—or at least act sicker—when they contract the virus, while women soldier on with work, childcare and life.

The scientific evidence for this is far from conclusive, but some research has shown that male and female immune cells do react differently to invading viruses. Now, a recent study in mice adds more fuel to the fire, suggesting that the male sex really does get hit harder by certain illnesses—and that physiology, not psychology, may be at least partially to blame.

In the recent study, published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity, adult male mice displayed more symptoms of sickness than females when they were exposed to bacteria that cause an illness with symptoms similar to the flu. The males also had more fluctuations in body temperature, fever and signs of inflammation, and took longer to recover.

Studies done in lab animals do not necessarily apply to humans, so this research should be taken with a large grain of salt. But experts who research gender and immunity say that it raises an intriguing scientific question for people, as well. Studies with human cells—as well as in mice—show that male immune cells have more active receptors for certain pathogens, says Sabra Klein, associate professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“It isn’t always the presence of the microbe or the presence of the virus that makes us sick,” says Klein. “It’s our immune response, and the research shows that males have a heightened response that summons cells to the site of infection, which contributes to the overall feeling of sickness.”

The reason why isn’t completely understood, but one hypothesis holds that testosterone and estrogen affect these immune receptors in different ways. The new mouse findings did not support a link between sex hormones and sickness (they removed mice’s reproductive organs and still saw different responses), but several other studies have. Klein’s 2015 study on human cells, for example, found that estrogen-based compounds made it harder for a flu virus to infect the samples.

Another theory, put forth by a 2010 study from researchers at the University of Cambridge, is that men have evolved to have weaker immune systems and lower immunity because of their tendency for risk-taking behaviors. Still other research suggests that because women more easily pass pathogens onto their children, they’ve built up more natural defenses against them.

These protections don’t extend to all types of sickness, however. In a 2016 article published in Nature Reviews Immunology, Klein noted that while males show increased susceptibility to certain illnesses (like non-reproductive cancers), women are more susceptible to others, like autoimmune diseases.

As for “man flu,” other things may play a role, as well. Studies show that men are less likely to wash their hands regularly, for example, and at least in the United States, they are less likely to see their doctors regularly. “Cultural norms absolutely affect our behaviors,” says Klein, “so it’s likely a combination of many different factors.”

Credit: Rick Liu

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Ottawa researchers finds man-flu is real - Metro News

Recent science seems to show that man-flu is real.

According to research at the University of Ottawa, that lump of a man camping out on the couch under blankets and empty bowls of ramen noodles may in fact have a worse time with the flu than women.

That is, if the effects of flu-like symptoms on mice are any indication.

It was research by the university’s NeuroImmunology, Stress and Endocrinology Lab that stumbled upon support for the existence of man-flu.

In studying how stress during puberty changes the brain, they tested how mice of different ages and sexes reacted to a bacterial endotoxin that induces symptoms seen in human flu.

Test results found that adult male mice displayed more sickness behaviour, that their body temperature fluctuated more than female mice, and they took longer to recover, according to a University of Ottawa press release.

“We were really surprised, and at first, we were like, ‘Is this real?’” said Nafissa Ismail, director of the NISE lab.

But, after replicating their result twice in the lab, Ismail had little doubt.

“There was just such a huge difference between the males and the females,” she said.

Originally, the adult mice were only meant as controls for pubescent mice. But it turns out adult males were the only ones with significantly worse symptoms.

“My data supports the idea that the man flu isn’t just a myth,” said Ismail.

It also showed that balls aren’t the problem either. At least not at that age.

Previous research that found differences in immune response between men and women suggested it could be linked to sex hormones, according to U of O’s news release.

“Testosterone is generally seen as an immune suppressor and estrogen as an immune enhancer,” it reads.

However, after removing the male mice’s gonads, both adult and pubescent mice had even worse flu symptoms. The testes are where most of a male’s testosterone comes from.

Ismail said she thinks that testosterone may still be the culprit, but that it could have caused lasting effects well before pubescence.

Ismail’s wider research interest is in understanding why stressful events during puberty appear to have long-term effects on reproductive and other behaviours, as well as the brain itself, and why these events appear to affect females more.

Next, Ismail and her students look to tackle mononucleosis, or the kissing disease.

MARCH 2017 Jounalism continued from page 20 The Metro article featured the headline “Ottawa researchers finds man-flu is real.” A title can convey a lot of meaning. Not only is it likely the pitch, but it can also colour the reader’s expectations for what conclusions to take away from the article before they’ve even read it. In this case, the author has either intentionally or unintentionally framed this story in the form of debate, and made a ruling before we get to read further.

A group at the University of Michigan, whose mission is to provide tools to identify and analyse bias in news media, say that conflict is one of the most common frames. In this article the audience has almost been set up to take sides before any more context is given.

According to Metro News, the idea that men go overboard when complaining about the severity of their symptoms when sick, is “real.” Two sides are presupposed: on one side men have a weak constitution and exaggerate their symptoms to get attention (i.e. illegitimate); on the other, men feel the symptoms of illness more than the opposite sex because of a biological imbalance between the two sexes (i.e. legitimate).

The title also connects this article to a larger discussion on societal gender norms which has the potential to polarize the audience to have a certain expectation or judgement before they even read the actual article.

The title frames this scientific finding through the lens of conflict and tells the audience what to expect, but how does the body influence our interpretation of the scientific finding? To attempt to answer this question, we will next look at the use of direct quotation to convey information.

Most of the information

is presented through direct quotes from the director of the lab. This automatically lends credibility to the article. Although the head researcher is an authoritative source, it is worth noting that the actual research paper is almost never mentioned. This piece of reporting is supported by the authority that the lead researcher on this research gives using direct quotes.

Therefore, any bias is reinforced by that authority. For example: “...We were really surprised, and at first, we were like, ‘Is this real?’” said Nafissa Ismail, director of the NISE lab. But, after replicating their result twice in the lab, Ismail had little doubt...”

The reporter is informing us on what is ‘real’ (i.e. the man-flu), and telling us that this scientist has little doubt that it is. Few findings are presented from the paper, and then used to support the conclusion of the researcher. It is also worth pointing out that research to the contrary is not presented in contrast to this finding, or acknowledged.

Only once does the reporter attempt to question the validity of the finding, when he states: “That is, if the effects of flu-like symptoms on mice are any indication.”

This of course outlines a very important question posed by scientists and philosophers alike, which is: are animal models predictive for humans? A question well explored by a paper of the same name, published in 2009 by Shanks et al. in the Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine. They state: “If a modality such as animal testing or using animals to predict pathophysiology in human disease is said to be a predictive modality, then any data generated from said modality should have a very high probability of being true in humans.

Animal models of disease and drug response fail this criterion.”

This debate has many wide-ranging implications for modern medical science, and it looks as if there will not be a definitive answer anytime soon. The reporter does not provide context or explanation to the question of the validity in correlating an observed sex-asymmetry in flu symptoms across species.

There is an inexhaustible array of lenses which can be used to analyze any piece of journalism. Whether intentional or not, we have demonstrated how the title influences the interpretation of what is ostensibly an informative piece on newly published research. We have also briefly shown how a lack of an alternative viewpoints can create an unbalanced piece of journalism, biased to a single interpretation of the scientific findings.

This exercise is a good reminder that we should all be skeptics, and to never take anything at face value. Even if the author didn’t mean to take a side, the style of writing, the word choice, and the facts chosen to illuminate an issue all do end up biasing a piece of writing. This isn’t limited to just journalism; though the analysis was done on news articles, there’s sure to be bias in the scientific studies themselves. That bias may not be limited to how their findings are reported through words, but also through the methodology used, the data they chose to support their claims, and even the instruments they used to observe the data. At the risk of sounding preachy, during an age where information is ubiquitous and anybody can publish their thoughts to the world, it’s important for us to be smart and to not believe everything that’s written on the internet (or in a newspaper).

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MARCH 2017

ECC Follow-up LU CHEN Cannon Editor-in-Chief As reported in The Cannon in its November 2016 edition, the Faculty has been planning to overhaul the Engineering Career Centre (ECC), making major changes to its leadership, operations, and structure.

At the time, the proposed changes were very unclear, as information on what exactly needed to be changed and how those changes should be implemented had not yet been gathered. The Cannon followed up with Prof. McCabe, the academic director of the ECC, to see what progress has been made since November.

All in all, it seems that nothing has yet been implemented. Interviews for the new Director of the ECC are currently underway. As soon as the Director is in place, the Faculty and relevant student groups will work together to “plan the way forward,” according to Prof. McCabe. When asked about the proposed changes, Prof. McCabe only said that they had “gathered a great deal of information on problems and solutions from stakeholders and contributors.”

“

and recommendations on the ECC’s career portal, professional development services, financial transparency, corporate and external relations, and structure and accountability. This report is presumably one of the sources of information that Prof. McCabe mentioned.

The report is structured around the 162 responses the AAC received from its ECC Feedback survey. The overall impression of the ECC is very poor: over 73% of participants rated their experience a 5 or below out of 10, with 15% rating it a 1 out of 10.

In regards to the Career Portal, student feedback indicates that the current two-business day deliberation period (where students accept or reject an offer) is too short, with the report recommending that the ECC offer at least a week and be more flexible in accommodating special circumstances as needed by employers and students.

The report also states that students would like to know employers’ preferences (how the companies ranked them) so that they’d be able to make informed decisions when accepting or rejecting offers.

employers and experienced students, that the company sessions lacked discipline diversity, and that the counselling sessions were too generic and felt very rushed.

Recommendations made by the AAC regarding these services are mainly to engage industry professionals and to ensure that counsellors have experience in the engineering industry.

71% of students reported that they were dissatisfied with the fees they had to pay for PEY ($1100 total) and eSIP ($400). As the ECC’s sole revenue stream is the application fees, recommendations include finding alternative revenue streams from external sources, like corporate sponsorship, and to lower the fees needed to access the ECC’s services (or to waive them for students who don’t end up getting a placement).

The AAC also contacted employers to get a feel for their experience with the ECC. Both employers that responded reported that the ECC was too inflexible when it came to what qualified as ‘co-op,’ and that there is a barrier for new companies as PEY isn’t a traditional co-op program.

Recommendations are to

Over 73% of participants rated their experience a 5

or below out of 10, with 15% rating it a 1 out of 10.

The Cannon then turned to EngSoc to see if anything noteworthy had happened on their end.

Fortunately, here was much more concrete feedback: the Academic Advocacy Committee (AAC) has prepared a 44-page report on the ECC, which highlights student feedback

Additionally, students reported great dissatisfaction with the ECC’s professional development services, which include resume and cover letter workshops, company info/networking sessions, and one-on-one counselling. Major complaints are that the workshops lacked the perspective of

offer flexible starting dates, to allow students to break their internships up into 4 month terms, and to consult with companies new to the PEY program in designing a custom plan that fits the company’s specific needs.

The last topic the AAC addresses is that of structure and accountability within

An infographic of the current state of things at the Engineering Career Centre. . Credit: Rick Liu the ECC. The current structure consists of one Director, one Assistant Director, three Internship Programme Coordinators, two Program Administrators, and two full-time career counsellors. Furthermore, the feedback the ECC collects come in two forms: informal, at employer events and counselling sessions, and formal, through the midand end-of-term reports, and there is no form of accountability at the moment.

Recommendations include forming what the report terms an “Accountability Committee” that holds the ECC accountable, collects student and employer

feedback, and determines the long-term vision; hiring full time counsellors with P.Engs; hiring staff to further expand and develop the ECC’s professional network; and working with YNCN and EngSoc to provide peer counselling.

Hopefully, when school reopens next September, engineering students will finally have a career centre to be proud of. The Faculty appears to be very committed to improving and restructuring the ECC, and it does not seem unreasonable for us to expect that career services from UofT Engineering will increase in quality.

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The Inside Perspective on Group Midterms ANDREW UDERIAN Cannon Senior Editor One aspect of university all engineers experience is midterm tests and examinations.

Generally, students tend to either be indifferent to these evaluations or despise them, and math midterms are often some of the most polarizing.

However, progress has been made towards making math evaluations both more fun and more applicable to real world problem solving.

Since 2011, the University of British Columbia has used two-stage evaluations on high-stakes math and science evaluations, leading to increased student engagement and averages.

At the University of Toronto, Professor Bernardo Sousa has worked to implement two-stage examinations in mathematics courses, most notably in Calculus II (MAT187).

When asked about the genesis of group tests within Skule, Professor Sousa replied, “My personal effort began with tutorials,

...[which] used to be hosted by one TA who solved problems on the board with little to no interaction from students. Now, students work in teams on problems that are open-ended and involve critical thinking and problem solving skills.” After the introduction of teambased tutorial problems, Professor Sousa moved to implement similar problems in a group problem-solving section on calculus exams.

Within the profession of engineering, it is incredibly rare for practitioners to work alone. The ability for engineers to work with their colleagues effectively is essential, yet difficult to develop. One of Professor Sousa’s primary motivations behind using two-stage evaluations was the desire to foster the skill of teamwork within engineering undergraduate students. Arguing for the alternative tests, he stated, “students get to see the social aspect of mathematics and engineering... engineers don’t work by themselves, they work in teams... they

create a very dynamic feedback loop of ideas, bouncing off of each collaborator to get ideas that would be much harder to get to otherwise.”

Despite the benefits of group evaluations, the tests have remained controversial amongst the student body.

Students often question the fairness of two-stage examinations, particularly due to the freedom given to students to choose their own groups. Many students assume that their highachieving peers will cluster together, leaving those who struggle in the subject to struggle and fail together.

However, in the case of the two-stage mathematics examinations, that assumption is untrue.

According to Professor Sousa, both random selection and selfselection were trialled in another course before the introduction of group examinations to MAT187, with self-selection leading to a greater correlation between the individual and group portions of

the exam. Although the approach leads to a similar distribution of marks as the individual portion, if the individual portion is assumed to be fair then the group portion must be as well. Furthermore, random groups would simply be far more challenging logistically: “Assigning random groups means that we must organize students (250+ in some rooms) to find their own group/table quickly.”

Despite the controversy surrounding group evaluations amongst the student populace, the method appears to produce results, with a higher average on the group portion of midterms versus the individual portion.

Furthermore, the group portion allows more students to enjoy their evaluation and mathematics. Speaking from the perspective of an instructor, Professor Sousa stated, “students laugh while writing this part of the test, so you just get the feeling that everyone can enjoy math if put in the right

setting. As a mathematics instructor, it is incredibly satisfying to witness the group part of the test.”

Although midterms bring stress for many students, being able to collaborate with friends on the same problem appears to relieve that stress and even make parts of the evaluation enjoyable.

The use of two-stage evaluations in subjects that have been traditionally individually evaluated, such as mathematics, seems counter-intuitive at first glance. Many students argue that such tests are less fair; however, the results from the midterms, both anecdotal and otherwise, have suggested that a group portion improves student learning and enjoyment of evaluations. Due to the results, group midterms will continue to be a part of the mathematics curriculum at UofT, and will continue to be refined in order to change midterm evaluations from a source of stress into a more pleasant learning experience.

Group midterms can often cause a lot of stress on the part of students involved. Credit: Muhammad Qumbar Ali