October 17, 2011

THE Varsity

Vol. CXXXII, No. 8

University of Toronto’s Student Newspaper Since 1880

The author of Ghost World and Wilson discusses his relationship with Spiderman, the Iraq invasion, and dogs in his latest graphic novel, The Death Ray see page 11

17 October, 2011

Contents The lesser of two evils — PC or NDP?

Did you just high-five that person’s wave?

Things get awkward with Erin Rodgers

Microsoft Chief Research Officer Craig Mundie talks cybersecurity, patenting, and the future of the Internet

How your brain plots against you

Intramurals?

At U of T? Alberto Bustamante seeks them out Bernarda Gospic/THe VArsity

VARSITY NEWS

news@thevarsity.ca

monday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

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Toronto occupied Aidan Gowland VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR

Toronto’s financial district came under siege this weekend when thousands of Torontonians taking part in “Occupy Toronto” filled the streets in protest. Toronto was one of over 981 cities in 85 countries that responded to New York’s “Occupy Wall Street” movement, which began last September 17.

In the weeks before September 17, a group called Occupy Wall Street that touted the slogan “We are the 99%”, put out calls for New Yorkers to congregate in New York City’s financial district and oppose bank bailouts, corporate tax loopholes, and the growing gap between the American rich and poor. Four weeks later, a group that included students, nurses, journalists, medics, and web developers began occupying Toronto.

During the lead-up to Saturday’s protests and the occupation startdate, Occupy Toronto held numerous General Assemblies where they voted on and discussed decisions including from press organizations to talk to, what food to bring, how to contact legal aid and how the protesters would maintain a steady supply of water and medical supplies. During these assemblies, organizers kept the location of the occupation secret to keep police guessing.

After hundreds had gathered outside the TD Bank building at King and Bay on October 15, it was announced that the occupation would take place at St. James’ Park. The protesters marched towards the park peacefully, chanting slogans such as, “They say cut back, we say fight back!” and “The people, united, can never be defeated!” — both of which were both used

in other Occupy protests around the world. One person held a sign that read, “I can’t afford a lobbyist. I am the 99%,” while another held one that said, “This revolution will not be privatized.”

In the US, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been fueled for a month by concerns ranging from a growing homeless population to high unemployment rates and exposés about the Koch brothers, the billionaire owners of Koch Industries, the largest privately-owned company in the US. Toronto, however, may be wary of another large-scale protest with G20 events fresh in Torontonians’ minds.

Dr. Wendy Dobson, Co-Director of the Rotman Institute for International Business, doubted Toronto’s protests would be as popular or successful as its American counterparts.

“Canada’s problems are nowhere near what has sent young Americans to those demonstrations,” said Dobson, who pointed out that Canada has a much better unemployment support system and that the country’s banks are highly capitalized.

Although Dr. Dobson mentioned Canada’s lower unemployment rates are keeping people away from civil disobedience, she also said that Canada’s youth unemployment rates are high and the country should be doing more to eliminate that like creating a jobs corps and helping young people stay in or go back to school.

In a general assembly held this weekend, the protesters came to an agreement that there will be a march and two assemblies each day. But with Canada doing much better economically than other countries, it remains to be seen whether the energy and desperation that led protests in New York will continue to stretch north of the border.

Wyatt Clough/THe VArsity

Thousands march through financial district in protest

A protestor watches on in silence as Occupy Toronto is underway.

UTM student lectures against Holland Marsh energy plant “Project Trident” series aims to spread environmental awareness Akihiko Tse

Bernarda Gospic/THe VArsity

VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR Luka Medved, a third-year environmental management major, is hosting a lecture series called “Project Trident” to raise awareness about the environmental consequences of building a natural gas plant at the legislatively protected Holland Marsh.

Held at UTM, “Project Trident” takes issue on Veresen Inc.’s York Energy Centre (YEC), which will be built on Holland Marsh, a fertile 2,900 hectare land that yields approximately $50 million in harvest and crops per year.

It will be directly on top of a flood plain and near a local canal that drains in to Cook’s Bay, a branch of Lake Simcoe.

The YEC, a $365 million plant, is also known as the “York Peaker” as it will generate power at peak demand times.

“There have been a lot of corners that have been cut by the Ontario government to allow this project to come about. I’m essentially questioning the project with the help of professors and this is because they’re more qualified to question and answer certain things than me,” Medved said. “There are a lot of conflicting reports. Information from the government is being kept from the public and it’s very secretive.”

Medved hopes to convene a panel of experts through his lectures before moving on to the “student stage.” If the previous two stages are successful, he will present his final version of the lectures to members of the public.

“Hopefully [we can] curb the project’s current location and move it elsewhere,” he said.

Critics of the plant agree, saying that they acknowledge a need for additional power in the area but, the location raises more questions than answers.

According to a Toronto Star report published last year, documents obtained from Ontario Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller cited that the Liberals ignored standard environmental protocols, such as the Planning Act, which would have evaluated other alternatives to “a wider environmental context.”

The documents also outline that the construction of the

YEC will violate Premier Dalton McGuinty’s own Greenbelt Act legislation, which serves to protect ecologically sensitive areas from urban development.

Medved has requested a copy of the commissioner’s report but has not received it yet. He has also requested that the Premier attends one of his lectures, but has been rebuffed.

Though Medved’s efforts have been ignored by the Premier, some officials have shown their support.

“The audacity of a government that ignores the concerns of local citizens and of local elected officials — concerns echoed by the Environment Commissioner of Ontario — and in addition dodges their own legislation, is shocking,” wrote Ontario Green Party leader Mike Schreiner on his website.

Veresen Inc.’s company website stated that the new “quick-response” YEC would provide a continuous energy supply that “meets all Ontario Ministry of Environment standards on emission limits.”

The website also noted that the plant is located beyond the flood plains and the only structure located in the plains is the driveway, making up three per cent of the entire structure.

However, Medved said that with the risk of flooding in the area, the plant is very likely to act as a direct point source of pollution and contaminants may enter the local water supply, which will be problematic as the Holland Marsh yields approximately 50 per cent of Ontario’s produce.

Despite his efforts and Mike Schreiner’s campaigning, the YEC is, according to the residents, still being built on top of a flood plain.

“It sounds like this is just a case of the province pushing a poor location for this plant. They should instead find municipalities that want such a plant built, not force one where the local residents and politicians are in opposition,” said UTM geography professor, Nathan Basiliko, who plans to attend Medved’s first lecture.

Basiliko said that he is delighted that a student has gone beyond the classroom to raise an environmental issue.

Veresen Inc. and its representatives were unavailable for comment.

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VARSITY NEWS

monday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

news@thevarsity.ca

Hart House interim Warden appointed Professor Bruce Kidd discusses his new role

VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR

On October 1, the University Affairs Board of the Governing Council appointed U of T, professor Bruce Kidd, as the Interim Warden of Hart House.

He is replacing Dr. Louise Cowin, who will be joining the University of British Columbia as Vice President, Students and his appointment has been received positively by staff and students.

Dan DiCenzo, Vice President University Affairs and Academics for UTMSU and Undergraduate Student Representative on the University Affairs Board, commented that “the new appointed Warden [possesses] the required experience … to ensure Hart House continues to be a success.” He also mentioned that the decision to appoint Professor Kidd was unanimous.

Professor Kidd’s involvement and experience with Hart House and the University of Toronto began in the early 1960s.

“I’ve been involved at U of T most of my life. I first came here as a high school student to see a play in the theatre, and the next year, I came to train with the U of T track team,” Kidd said. “I turned down offers to go to any other university … [because] through Hart House, I had discovered the energy of U of T, the intellectual stimulation, and the mix of sport, arts, and literature.”

In 1970, Kidd was offered a lecturer’s position in political science and then proceeded to teach public policy during a ten-year stead at the Faculty of Physical Education and Health, where he later

became the Dean.

“And I’m still here,” Kidd said proudly.

His involvement at U of T extends beyond his work as a professor. During his university years, Kidd was a staff member at The Varsity, a successful track athlete, and was inducted into U of T’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1988. His many achievements include being twice inducted into the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame and receiving the Order of Canada in 2004.

“I’ve had a very rich life, largely because I’ve been involved at U of T,” said Kidd.

When asked about his goals as Warden of the House, Kidd revealed that he is committed to promoting accessibility and inclusivity in Hart House. He remembered a time when the House only catered to Anglo-Saxon, upper class males, and women had to fight for the right to participate. He recalled the struggles of his female teammates who were denied the right to use the facilities in the 1960s.

In particular, he discussed having to open fire doors to help his female teammates sneak into the building just so they could access the facilities. The women had to wear hoodies in order to pass as men. Once, he remembers Canadian track star and U of T alumna Abby Hoffman attempting to use the track “as an open woman” and being denied the right to participate. “…And this was a woman who represented Canada in four Olympic games,” said Kidd, outraged.

Acknowledging Hart House as a site for equity struggles but also a symbol of democracy and evolution, Kidd is dedicated to “making [the] building, its programs, and activities welcoming to every U of T student regardless of their

background.” He maintains a positive vision for the future of the House.

“One of the great strengths of Hart House is that students [can be] engaged in just about every aspect,” said Kidd.

“It’s a tremendous place for students to learn about the richness of Canadian culture … It’s ‘a living laboratory’. I call it the co-curricular college — it’s all about learning in a synergistic and exciting way.”

Kidd promised to devote himself to his responsibilities as Warden and work in conjunction with the other members of the House in a collective effort to achieve success.

“I want to provide support of continuity to the directions that were launched by the previous Warden and turn the House over to a new Warden in the spring with all the momentum that one would hope,” he said. “[I want to make] the informal co-curricular agenda in the house an even more effective place for learning and infuse that spirit in every aspect of the House.”

“We’re excited to see Professor Kidd return to the University in the role of Warden at Hart House,” said Danielle Sandhu, President of UTSU. “We value his work on challenging discrimination, increasing accessibility to sport, and improving fitness. We look forward to working with him to ensure that Hart House continues to provide an inclusive space for our members to develop culturally, artistically and recreationally, and that these goals are supported by all members of the University community.”

Bernarda Gospic/THe VArsity

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VARSITY NEWS

monday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

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The 100 series:

Meet Jeffrey Kopstein Jeffrey Kopstein, POL101 professor, talks ‘Con Hall’ with The Varsity Irina Vukosavic Dr. Jeffrey Kopstein, one of the professors behind POL101, feels like he’s on display when he lectures in Convocation Hall.

“It’s kind of like being in a Roman colosseum, but good thing students are better behaved than the audience in ancient Rome!” jokes Kopstein, as he sits crosslegged in his office at the Centre for Jewish Studies in Sidney Smith Hall.

The course is attended by around 1200 students every lecture and although it is about political science, the class’s topic of conversation sometimes drifts elesewhere.

“One time, somebody brought a puppy to class. Of course, I wanted my students to like me and the last thing I wanted was to be portrayed as was a puppy hater. I tried to let it go but the puppy was being pretty uncooperative.

In the end, I had to tell the student to give it to someone outside the lecture,” he says.

Bizarre scenarios like these aside, Kopstein says that teaching in front of a large audience is a stimulating experience. To keep such a large group interested, he uses humour in an effort to get the students to see him in a friendlier and less intimidating way.

“The big secret that students don’t necessarily know is that professors learn more from their colleagues and their students than their students learn from them.”

U of T, he explains, has professors that are at the cutting edge of new ideas within their fields. In his department, he is lucky to have fantastic colleagues that can help. Students also help by simply being in lecture and reacting to the material.

After covering a point in a certain way, for example, Kopstein can tell from the students’ facial expressions what works and what doesn’t. If the way he has taught something is not suitable, he modifies his teaching method for next class.

The new course, which was only created last year, has been taught by Kopstein since its beginnings. “I get to help shape the way so many first-year students get to think about politics. What I teach them will stick with them for the rest of their careers, maybe even the rest of their lives,” he says.

He emphasizes that the University of Toronto is filled with very intelligent students that may have read the material beforehand. His job is to try to unsettle their opinions and allow them to read the works of great scholars with an open mind.

Not only does he enjoy teaching students, he enjoys meeting them as well. Kopstein is happy to chat anywhere, whether grocery shopping on a Sunday afternoon or meeting a student on a trip to Romania.

“To get through these big lectures, it’s really important to make that effort to get to know your professor. I love meeting my students and I wish they came to my office hours more,” he remarks.

Kopstein also tries to get students in his big classes to ask questions. In his lectures, he dedicates 45 minutes to lecturing and 15 minutes to asking questions. In such a large group, the old cliché of other people having the same question is, statistically speaking, almost certain.

Kopstein says that he understands how it is to be a freshman and recommends students ask questions to help clarify lecture material and build public speaking skills.

“I went to Berkeley at the University of California, and I was a first-year student once too,” he recalled. “It took me a while to overcome my intimidation, but after I did, it really helped. First year students need to keep in mind that our job, as professors, is to be less intimidating and more open.”

Kopstein is also Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies. In his role, he focuses on questions about ethnic violence, and specifically on the politics behind the Holocaust. He bases most of his published research on this topic and draws conclusions from his work to present in his lectures. He emphasizes that the only way to prevent political upheaval is to understand it from a scholarly point of view.

“This course is like a buffet. Students are able to come up and try different types of foods and see which ones they like enough to go back for seconds.”

Bernarda Gospic/THe VArsity

VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR

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U of T raises awareness for mental health MIAW encourages conversation among students to overcome mental illness

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Dwayne G. White VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR

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EVENT MANAGEMENT

Inspired by a national public education campaign, Mental Illness Awareness Week (MIAW) at U of T took place October 2–9.

Originally begun to raise awareness around mental illness, its prevalence on campus, and the stigma around mental health, the program has achieved such great success that the university has declared October Mental Illness Awareness Month (MIAM) on campus.

“For several years now, we have broadened that focus to include an emphasis on the importance of positive mental health, and to expand our programming beyond the first week to the full month of October,” said Judy Vorderbrugge, Community Health Coordinator at U of T’s health promotion programs.

“According to a 2009 survey, 36 per cent of U of T students report that stress negatively impacts their academic performance, 25 per cent say that anxiety has had the same impact, and 15 per cent say that depression has negatively impacted their academics,” Vorderbrugge said.

While members of certain ethnicities and genders are not specifically prone to this illness, common stressors have been identified in the student population.

Psychology professor Dax Urbszat noted that “there are common stressors that many students will experience to some degree, such as new autonomy and independence,” which greatly affect academic performance. According to Urbszat students tend to demonstrate these difficulties through missed tests, self-handicapping (providing an excuse for failure) and procrastination.

However, Urbszat said that speaking about one’s mental health can be the first step towards recovery.

“Talking about it needs to be something that is okay. We must strip away this idea of stigma,” said Urbszat. “To overcome stigmatization is first to educate people so that they can understand. Second is for people who suffer from mental illness to overcome their fear of sharing this information.”

MIAW and MIAM are the catalysts for this dialogue at U of T. “Events like these are really about trying to start the conversation and to get people talking

about the issues. I think that this event did that in the short term, [now] the challenge is to find a way to sustain the conversation,” Vorderbrugge said.

Many students agree that the conversation surrounding this issue is important.

Recent graduate Asante Haughton, who experienced depression during his early adult years, said that confiding in a close friend or family member and trying to seek professional help is the best way to address mental illness.

“The sooner people get treated during their earlier experience the better chance they have to be depression free for the rest of their life,”said Karen Liberman, former Executive Director of the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario.

“People who have depression in their adulthood are more likely to suffer economically and are less likely to be able to stay at work productively over periods of time,” she added.

U of T provides on-campus services to help students treat these illness.

“There are services on campus such as Accessibility Services and Counselling and Psychological Services that can help,” said Erin H., a psychology major and student now in recovery from an illness.

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Zombies injured on Resident Evil set Twelve actors dressed as zombies were taken to several Toronto hospitals with non-life threatening injuries last Tuesday after suffering a fall from a raised platform on the local set of Resident Evil: Retribution.

Injuries ranged from bruising to cracked ribs, but paramedics who responded to the accident call had difficulties differentiating between legitimately injured actors and those who were simply in costume.

Describing the scene of the accident, police Sergeant Andrew Gibson said, “It did kind of catch us off-guard when we walked in.”

“I was trying to figure out where the blood was coming from and what blood was real blood,” recalled EMS responder Nicole Rodrigues.

The Ministry of Labour has initiated an investigation into the accident.

— Mayce Al-Sukhni With files from the Toronto Star, BBC and CBS.

University of Toronto tops Feminist nun’s world rankings controversial 17th The University of Toronto is curent- century letters ly the top university in Canada, translated placing first in the country and 19th worldwide, according to the annual Times Higher Education ranking.

Though ranked 17th last year, U of T is maintaining its lead over UBC and McGill that are further behind at 22nd and 28th. Based on categories like quality of teaching, research, citations, industry income and international outlook, U of T’s comprehensive score is down 0.4 per cent from last year’s scores.

The University is still the sole Canadian school to hold a top 20 spot in what The Globe and Mail called the “most influential global rating systems.”

“I am delighted to see our dedicated faculty, and those of many sister institutions, recognized for their inspiring teaching and world-leading research,” said U of T’s President, David Naylor, in a university-issued press release. U of T has maintained its top 20 status for two years.

— Jennifer Gosnell With files from The Globe and Mail and Times Higher Education.

Iconic feminist nun Arcangela Tarabotti’s translated letters are being released by the University of Toronto early next year.

Tarabotti, a Venetian-born rebel Benedict nun, was forced into a convent at the age of 11 — a custom for rich Italian families. This experience led her to pen six controversial books denouncing the Italian patriarchy, such as “Paternal Tyranny” and “Convent Life as Inferno.”

Meredith Ray, a University of Delaware Italian professor and co-editor of the book, told to the Toronto Star that Tarabotti refused to crumble under criticism to write her novels and braved the risk of execution.

Following the U of T release, the Toronto Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and the publishing house Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages, have decided to publish “Arcangela Tarabotti: Letters Familiar and Formal,” an English-translated compilation of Tarabotti’s letters.

— Marie-Violette Bernard With files from the Toronto Star.

VARSITY NEWS

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VARSITY COMMENT

monday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

THEVOL. Varsity CXXXII VARSIT HE

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No. 8

The wealthy voter subsidy Harper’s plan to cancel the per-vote subsidy is meant to benefit his richest supporters Simon Capobianco

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21 Sussex Avenue, Suite 306 Toronto, ON, M5S 1J6 Phone: 416-946-7600 Fax: 416-946-7606 www.thevarsity.ca

Editorial Board

Editor-in-Chief Tom Cardoso editor@thevarsity.ca Design Editor Anamarija Korolj design@thevarsity.ca Photo Editor Bernarda Gospic photo@thevarsity.ca Online Editor Sam Bowman online@thevarsity.ca Senior Copy Editor Maayan Adar copy@thevarsity.ca News Editor Sarah Taguiam news@thevarsity.ca Comment Editor Alex Ross comment@thevarsity.ca Arts & Entertainment Editor Ariel Lewis arts@thevarsity.ca Features Editor Erene Stergiopoulos features@thevarsity.ca Science Editor Bianca Lemus Lavarreda science@thevarsity.ca Sports Editor Murad Hemmadi sports@thevarsity.ca Associate Design Editor Vacant Associate Photo Editor Rob Leone Associate Online Editor Patrick Love Associate Copy Editor Vacant Associate News Editor Vacant Associate Comment Editor Vacant Associate A&E Editor Assunta Alegiani Brigit Katz Associate Sports Editor Vacant Associate Features Editor Simon Frank Associate Science Editor Ken Euler Copy Editors Fact Checkers Reshara Alviarez Elizabeth Benn Elizabeth Benn Laura Mitchell Emily Dunbar Sheena Singh Susan Gordon Bernarda Gospic Tina Hui Yi Qing Sim Sheena Singh Designers Photo and Illustration Yasi Eftekhari Wyatt Clough Jenny Kim Bernarda Gospic Suzy Nevins Kimberly Kwon Mushfiq Ul Huq Rob Leone Michelle Yuan Michelle Yuan Cover Art Courtesy of Daniel Clowes

Contributors

Mayce Al-Sukhni, Arash Azizi, Patrick Baud, Zoe Bedard, Marie-Violette Bernard, Alberto Bustamate, Simon Capobianco, Tanya Debi, Jennifer Gosnell, Aidan Gowland, Andrew Johnson, Brigit Katz, Dalana Parris , John Scott, Akihiko Tse, Irina Vukosavic, Keegan Williams, Dwayne White, David Woolley

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Chief Executive Officer Paul Humphrey ceo@thevarsity.ca Chief Financial Officer Vacant cfo@thevarsity.ca Chief Operations Officer coo@thevarsity.ca Matthew D. H. Gray Editor-in-Chief editor@thevarsity.ca Tom Cardoso Speaker Arman Hamidian speaker@thevarsity.ca Secretary Bethany McKoy secretary@thevarsity.ca Board Members Lauren Ash (St. George) Jessica Denyer (St. George) Matthew D. H. Gray (St. George) Paul Humphrey (St. George) Ariel Lewis (Staff) Andrew Rusk (Staff) Erene Stergiopoulos (Masthead) Vacant (UTSC) Vacant (UTM) Vacant (ProFac) Vacant (ProFac)

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VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR

Stephen Harper’s Progressive Conservative government is set to scrap the per-vote subsidy. The subsidy, instituted by the Chrétien Liberals as a concomitant to their proscription on corporate and union donations to political parties, allocates federal parties about $2 per year for every vote they won in the last election.

The subsidy, according to Harper, is responsible for the frequent elections with which he has been plagued. The other political parties, it seems, remain viable on the strength of their popular support “whether they raise any money or not.” “The war chests are always full for another campaign,” Harper opines. “You lose one [election]; [and]immediately in come the [per-vote subsidy] cheques and you are ready for another one, even if you didn’t raise a dime.” Whats more, the subsidy is manifestly unjust, he assures us, because: “Taxpayers shouldn’t have to support political parties that they don’t support” through public funding.

What Harper shrewdly forgets to mention amid such righteous pronouncements, is the other type of public subsidy which political parties receive — a subsidy which overwhelmingly benefits the Conservative Party — and which he does not plan on eliminating. When a private citizen makes a donation to a Canadian political party, he or she receives a tax credit refunding up to 75 per cent

of his or her donation, $650 is returned on the max donation of $1275. That means that when a conservative voter donates, say, $400 to Harper’s party, the PC gets the full $400 but the donor only pays $100 — the other $300 is paid for by the general tax pool. Unlike the per-vote subsidy, which awards money in proportion to popular support, this subsidy awards public money based upon how wealthy, and hence how capable of donating, each parties’ supporters are.

If Harper really believed that “Taxpayers shouldn’t have to support political parties that they don’t support” then he would eliminate the tax refund (which forces taxpayers of all political affiliations to subsidize individual donations) and leave the per-vote subsidy, which provides $2 for every voter who shows support for a given party by voting for it. Such a move is inconceivable, however, as the Conservatives, having the wealthiest constituents, receive far more private donations (and thus get more ‘support from tax-payers who don’t support it’) than the Liberals and NDP combined.

By eliminating the per-vote subsidy Harper is not acting on any principle; he is strategically removing a specific type of public funding (one which benefits all parties equally and democratically) while leaving in place another type of public funding (one which privileges parties with wealthy supporters — his most of all.)

As the PC’s fundraising website proudly states, “The Conservative Party of Canada is a Registered

Political Party and your contribution in any one year may entitle you to generous political tax credits on your next tax return.” For the wealthy, this is true. They can give up to $1275 to the Conservative Party (which provides them, and the corporations they manage, lucrative tax-cuts) while actually paying only $625 the rest being publicly subsidized. The refund, however, does not come until next year’s tax-return, so it is basically unavailable to the majority of Canadian workers who live pay-cheque to pay-cheque, although their tax-dollars still subsidize the political donations of the wealthy.

Eliminating the per-vote subsidy will not strengthen Canadian democracy but will make the support of wealthy individuals even more important than it already is and devalue the political power of the poor even further. The result is not hard to predict. Policy will be catered to the wealthy, with little regard for the poor — that means corporate tax-cuts paid for by service cuts.

A better way to reform Canada’s partyfinance system would be to eliminate the tax-refund that forces the general public to pay more than 50 per cent of any donation made by a given individual — or, better yet, eliminate private donations altogether — and increase the per-vote subsidy to make up the difference. This would make the ability of political parties to campaign effectively commensurate with their numerical support, not the wealth of their constituents.

Renewing our democracy

None of Ontario’s political parties offer power to the people Arash Azizi VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR

Preliminary figures shows that only 49.02 per cent of registered voters cast a ballot. For the first time in Ontario history, less than half cast a ballot to decide who would form the next government. This means more people essentially chose “none of the above.” The emphasis on “registered” is important because there are thousands of working-class citizens, so marginalized that they don’t even appear on the voter’s list (and to this we should add thousands of disenfranchised immigrants with “no status,” some of whom have lived here for decades.)

What are the implications of this massive abstinence? What does it tell us about the supposed “democratic” system in which we live?

For example, the Liberals, who gained only 37 per cent of the vote, have the right to govern this province with the votes of only about 18 per cent of the registered voters. If we take into account non-registered Ontarians we can see how small a mandate they really have.

So why is this the case? More voting options were offered this time than anytime in history. Internet voting was introduced in some parts. There was even “assistive voting technology” to help those with hearing and seeing impairments.

“Educated” elites (or cynics of all types) like to tell us that this is due to the electorate’s ignorance that they don’t have a sense of “civic duty.”

I, however, would argue that the problem doesn’t lie with people but with the system.

Looking back at the platforms of main political parties during the Ontario elections, we should ask ourselves if there was a single one who offered real solutions to unemployment, our ailing economy, and prevailing social inequalities. The answer is none.

The NDP, the party that was built by workers and progressives to challenge the status quo didn’t offer much more either. Horwath, who was mostly unknown to people before the debate,

promised “change that puts people first.” But her platform didn’t have much that was different from the parties of big business.

Looking at NDP’s platform, one actually wonders what Horwath meant by “change” since all she offered was the status quo. For solving the job crisis, she proposed to hire a ‘jobs commissioner,’ basically, another overpaid bureaucrat who could somehow beg the big business to please invest and “create jobs.” She suggested freezing already very high transit fares. For workers who drive, the NDP’s long-time policy of creating public

even my very own NDP — offered policies that would stand up to the austerity agenda that the capitalist governments are offering around the world.

While I had many positive reactions when canvassing in this election, I felt sympathy with every door that was shut on me with every working-class person who told me “these politicians are all the same.”

After all, this is the true balance sheet of the bogus capitalist “democracy”: Three successive governments (NDP, Progressive Conservatives, Liberal) have carried through cuts and austerity, and today, none of them promises anything else. Besides, there is no accountability whatsoever. Once elected, there is no meaningful way people can participate in making decisions that determine the course of their lives. (let alone the fact that most important decisions are not taken in Queen’s Park but in the boardroom tables that none of us are invited to).

This system offers little avenue for any sort of political participation.

Previously in this newspaper, I asked a question: with the situation as it is can our system even be called “rule of the people”? When I wrote that article, Bernarda Gospic/THe VArsity back in December 2010, I also said that these are not just “far-left musings” auto insurance was abandoned (for the first and that “thousands of Canadians [are] asking time in recent history). themselves this question.”

When it comes to areas where NDP has usuI might have been proven correct because ally fared better (health care and education) merely a few weeks after this dismal turnout, again, nothing more than status quo was of- thousands around the country are planning to fered. In fact, the NDP promised an additional launch #occupymovements $53 billion investment in health over the next similar to the one in New York. By taking aim four years. That is $7 billion short of what is re- at big corporations and banks, they show that quired to cover the current rate of increase in they know very well where the power lies. They expenditures. An NDP government was going to are voting with their feet. cut health care by 2015.

It is the job of political activists, including And finally, no doubt, the most disappoint- those in the NDP, to offer a solution that peoing section of NDP’s platform was post-sec- ple can rally around so they can abolish this ondary education. Directly going against its non-participatory dictatorship of capitalism own policy, again and again ratified at its and replace it with a democratic socialist sysconventions, the party promised a freeze on tem, where resources are owned collectively already skyrocketing tuition fees. and people can rule directly through their We can see that none of the parties — not own institutions.

comment@thevarsity.ca

VARSITY COMMENT

monday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

9

POINT COUNTERPOINT

Who should the Liberals work with?

The Liberals should form a coaliton with the PCs

The Liberals should form a coalition with the NDP

David Woolley

Patrick Baud

VARSITY STAFF

Bear with me, because what you are about to hear may sound like one of the most blasphemous and inconceivable ideas that will ever enter your mind, an event that, were it to happen, may lead to the end of the world as we know it — human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! Since our recent election resulted in a minority government, I propose that the Liberals, in an effort to get legislation passed smoothly and efficiently, form a coalition with the Progressive Conservatives.

Hold on! Before you tear up the paper, hear me out: this is an idea that could be ideal for both parties.

We are in a strange world politically not only in Canada, but around the world. In Britain, the Liberal Democrats are the junior partners in coalition with the Conservative Party, and in Ottawa, a leaderless NDP sits as one of the largest opposition parties in Canadian history.

The global economy is struggling its way out of a massive global downturn and all jurisdictions are being called upon to implement austerity measures. These bizarre circumstances may make it the right time to try something revolutionary — but utterly sensible.

To begin with, for a man who claimed to be a real change from the status quo, Tim Hudak ran on a platform that was surprisingly similar to McGuinty’s. On the big issues — job creation, healthcare and education — Hudak’s positions were, for the most part, indistinguishable from the premier’s.

Add to that the penchant for parties, once in power, to drift towards the centre and you are left with the realization that a Hudak government would not have been radically different from the McGuinty one it might have replaced. Partisan attacks have been so visceral and personal because on policy there is little difference to demonstrate.

Politically, it will be very hard for McGuinty to maintain an air of legitimacy as a Premier for all Ontarians when his party holds virtually no seats from rural ridings. Hudak’s PCs on the other hand are almost exclusively rural in their representation. If legitimacy in governing is to be desired — as one would imagine it would be — then this divide must be bridged.

Secondly, a coalition puts both leaders in a very comfortable position. McGuinty silences his greatest opposition by bringing them into the fold, leaving only 17 NDP MPs to be Official Opposition to a 90 seat—strong Liberal—PC government. This means that on the major issues, McGuinty will face no gridlock to getting his measures passed. However, this will not, necessarily, be a bad thing for Hudak. Four years from now, come election time, he can claim

$

4.00

DRINKS

ter the 1975 election, then leader of the New Democrats, Stephen Lewis, agreed not to defeat the Progressive Conservatives Despite a truly soporific campaign, the provin- under Bill Davis in exchange for the introcial election held earlier this month in Ontario duction of rent control legislation. yielded an interesting result. The vote left the It would be better for the Liberals and governing Liberals one seat short of a majority the New Democrats to sign a formal agreeat 53 seats. Last week, Liberal leader and current ment publicly so that they can be transPremier Dalton McGuinty announced his inten- parent about the purpose and limits of the tion to form a government without seeking to deal. The focus should be on the economy, form a coalition or to conclude another kind of which was where both parties devoted accord with one of the two opposition parties. much of their energy during the election Instead, McGuinty hopes to negotiate the campaign. Fortunately, both parties agree passage of individual laws with the opposi- broadly on the objectives of economic poltion. This may be the ideal strategy for the icy, if not necessarily on the means which Liberals, but it certainly is not for Ontarians. should be used to achieve them. During Rather than governing on an issue-by-issue the current climate of economic uncerbasis, the Liberals should seek to make a deal tainty, it is crucial that the government with the New Democrats. seek to encourage growth and to reduce While it would be unreasonable for them Ontario’s sizeable deficit. to form a coalition given the near majority While the specific policies that would be held by the Liberals, New Democratic leader used to achieve these goals would have to be Andrea Horwath could agree to support the negotiated between the two parties, there Liberals on the budget and a few key bills for were some hints offered during the election two or three years. In exchange for their sup- campaign of what such an approach would port, the Liberals would agree to modify their look like. For instance, rather than lowering policies, and adopt new ones in certain key corporate taxes across the board, the Liberareas. This would allow the Ontario govern- als could agree to focus tax cuts on small ment to function effectively and to avoid the and medium-sized businesses, which the kind of legislative deadlock that plagued the New Democrats advocated during the camfederal parliament during Stephen Harper’s paign. Since these businesses create most of early years as prime minister. the jobs in Ontario, it should be the governSuch an accord is not without precedent ment’s priority to ensure that they can do so. in Ontario nor even for the New DemoSimilarly, the New Democrats could lend crats. After the 1987 provincial election, their support to the Liberal proposal to crethen leader of the New Democrats, Bob Rae ate a grant that would reduce tuition fees for agreed to support David Peterson’s Liber- college and university programs by one third als to form the government in exchange for for most families. This is not to say, however, some policy concessions laid out in a for- that there would be complete agreement bemal agreement. An informal tween parties nor that there should be. They agreement would differ, for instance, on the role that the govalso be pos- ernment should play in protecting Ontario sible. Af- industries. Adopting a “Buy Ontario” policy, as the New Democrats propose, would weaken the competitiveness of Ontario businesses and thereby weaken Ontario’s ability to export. However, these differences should not be used as an excuse for the Liberals and korolj would like to shout out to zdaniuk, berube New Democrats not to work together to effectively govern Ontario.

The alternative is either years of legislative deadlock as the Liberals refuse to compromise or years of mediocre, timid government, left unable to make decisions to safeguard the future of Ontario. While the Liberals and the New Democrats certainly do not agree on all matters, they agree on what are the most important issues facing Ontario and can surely find a way to take action on them. If they cannot, then Ontario will not be well positioned to deal with the challenges that continued economic uncertainBernarda Gospic/THe VArsity ty may bring.

that any winning policy succeeded because it a) was either a PC proposal or b) was subject to PC reforms which made it successful.

Yet at the same time, Hudak can claim that any particularly unpopular or unsuccessful project was a bill pushed through the coalition by the Liberals against the will of the PCs. And if they didn’t vote in a way that suggests this to be the case, Hudak can shrug it off as a vote in which his hands were tied — claiming the future of the coalition rested on it and Hudak would have rather seen an imperfect Liberal— PC plan than a disastrous Liberal—NDP coalition that would come to pass if he broke ties with the Liberals.

Finally, it would give Hudak and his MPs serious governing experience. The coalition’s cabinet would have major posts filled by PCs, including a choice cabinet position for Hudak himself.

This would mean that any Hudak—led PC government in the future would not seem like an untested commodity but a safe and responsible alternative — you could change premiers without risking an untrained government.

Whether or not the leaders take up this idea depends on a number of variables: the personal egos of the leaders; the practical divide between the farthest right members of the PC caucus and the farthest left of the Liberals; the breaking of centuries of political tradition by forming a coalition between the two largest parties in parliament; as well as the popular response to such a move from Ontarians. All this considered, such a move is improbable but by no means impossible and should be considered seriously by the two leaders. Four years from now, come the next election, the Liberals and the PCs would both emerge from a coalition ideally positioned to portray themselves as serious contenders for the provincial government.

VARSITY STAFF

102 PETER STREET

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10 MONday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

VARSITY ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

arts@thevarsity.ca

Well, that was embarrassing BRIGIT KATZ gets awkward with Toronto's finest comedians at “AWKWARD: A Show of Epic Fails”

A

few weeks ago, I interviewed Erin Rodgers, a standup, sketch and improv comic from Toronto. At one point during the interview, the conversation veered to Rodgers’ undergraduate experience at U of T, and she began to tell me a rather amusing anecdote about the crowd of morose punk rockers that she was friendly with during university.

If I had actually thought it through, I probably would have realized that the most tactful approach to my next question would have been to simply ask Rodgers when she had graduated from university. At the moment, however, I was too preoccupied with trying to date the revival of the punk movement to

Rodgers also mentioned that comedians and non-comedians alike have expressed an interest in participating in the show.

“I’ve found that people kind of want to get [their embarrassing stories] off their chest,” she said. “Everyone knows that those stories are funny, and when it’s an atmosphere [where] … there’s a bunch of people who are going to do the same thing, I think you feel much more comfortable.”

However, as the October performance of AWKWARD proved, recounting an incident of personal humiliation in front of a live audience can be a risky business. Several of the comedians who were featured in the show

Erin Rodgers recounts an awkward story at the Comedy Bar. Sharilyn Johnson/AWKWARD SHOW

realize this, and instead blurted out: “So, you went to U of T in the ‘90s?”

Rodgers shook her head.

“Oh, the ‘80s then,” I said, without pausing to consider that my calculations would make Rodgers a suspiciously youthful forty-something.

Rodgers hesitated for a moment and then replied, “Actually, it was the 2000s.”

As I realized that I had just unintentionally implied that Rodgers looked old enough to be my mother, I was overcome by the sudden desire to crawl under my chair and hide there for a few hours. Fortunately, Rodgers seemed entirely unfazed by the conversation, which, in retrospect, is not entirely surprising. As she made clear during the interview, Rodgers has an appreciation for the cringe worthy moments that crop up during social interactions, an appreciation that she hopes to spread through her latest project, AWKWARD: A Show of Epic Fails.

AWKWARD, which Rodgers hosts and produces, takes place once a month at the Comedy Bar on Bloor St West. Each installment of the show features a different group of comedians who each share one of their most embarrassing stories with the audience. It’s a relatively simple premise, but Rodgers believes that AWKWARD is able to tap into the universal, psychological need to affirm that everybody, no matter how cool, occasionally acts like an idiot.

“Everyone feels like their embarrassing story is the most humiliating thing that has ever happened in the entire world,” she said.

“And then you hear all these other [embarrassing] things … and you realize ‘Oh my god, it’s not just me.’”

definitely fell flat with their stories, which weren’t awkward enough to be inherently funny or injected with enough humour to make them entertaining.

“I’m feeling kind of awkward right now, to be honest,” one comedian said, when the end of his story was met with silence and a single cough from somewhere in the back of the room.

“You and me both,” I thought.

The comedians who came equipped with more carefully constructed anecdotes, on the other hand, probably found the type of gratification that they were looking for when they agreed to relive their most embarrassing experience on stage. Luke Gordon Field was hilarious while describing how he was thrown off a mule during a vacation to Greece, and Jocelyn Geddie told an amusing story about how she came to compliment one of the cool girls in middle school on her “horny” dress, severely misinformed as to what the word actually meant. There was also a thoroughly typical, but nonetheless entertaining, “being-awkward-while tryingto-impress-a-girl” anecdote from John Baird, and a story from Jerry Schaffer, an alum of Second City, who once told the soon-to-befamous musician Jesse Cook that he needed to improve his keyboard skills.

Rodgers has plans to open AWKWARD up to non-professional performers who want to share their embarrassing stories, and during our interview, she invited me to participate in the next show. I’m not sure, however, that I have an awkward anecdote that is worthy for the stage. Perhaps I’ll try to guess the weight of my next interviewee and see how that goes.

arts@thevarsity.ca

VARSITY ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

MONday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

11

Up close with Clowes Ariel Lewis speaks with the man behind Ghost World, Art School Confidential, and Wilson I

n a soft spoken, almost sedate manner, Daniel Clowes ponders the webcomic.

As a cartoonist who began his career in the mid ‘80s, Clowes speculates that if he were starting out today, he would likely take the online route. Yet while the author appreciates the current accessibility of what was once an esoteric art form, he admits that he does not have a particular fondness for reading comics on a computer.

“I like to have that kind of one-on-one correspondence with the author, where you’re not distracted by anything else,” Clowes explains. “I don’t really like looking at the comics with the light emitted from behind them that you get on a computer screen. I’m much happier sitting in a chair with a book that I know is selfcontained and I know that the world of the comic is within that book, and when I put the book down, it won’t ask me to do anything else like a computer will.”

Daniel Clowes made his name in the world of alternative comics with his series called “Eightball” that began in 1989. With “Eightball,” which usually showcased a main story with a few backup features at the end, Clowes developed many of the characters he would later focus on in his graphic novels and films. The isolated and anguished Enid and Rebecca of Ghost World, the hacky and hopeful art students of Art School Confidential, and a handful of other finely drawn characters all developed their insight, neuroses, and slightly disturbed senses of humour in these early pages of his career. Clowes customarily keeps his characters brutally honest, adopting a stream-of-consciousness feel within the dialogue. The result is a narrative that feels real and deeply personal for both the author and the reader.

“I’m trying to be as honest as I can in my work and trying to find a way to communicate the unspeakable things that go on in my inner life. Things that I couldn’t quite articulate in a sentence, I’m trying to express through these created worlds and characters interacting with each other, and explore the various things that I find interesting, or exciting or anxiety provoking, or that engender some kind of emotion in me.”

In 2004, Clowes released a single-story issue of “Eightball”: The Death Ray; it was eventually released as a graphic novel on October 10 of this year. Set in the ‘70s, The Death Ray follows the fantastical story of Andy — an 18-year-old underdog who discovers that smoking cigarettes gives him super powers. Eventually acquiring a death ray gun, he and his friend go on a (fruitless) hunt for villains, which soon becomes a hunt for anyone.

“I came up with a very rudimentary version of the story when I was 16. It was about a kid … he had a ray gun and he had super powers and he lived with his grandfather, and his grandfather was killed by bullies at school and he sought revenge. But I never got anywhere into actually doing the story. I think I drew the cover, like, 50 times, trying to get it right, and then finally gave up. But I remember thinking a lot about the story and it had this great emotional impact on me … Doing the story at 45-years-old, it was much more about exploring the emotions I had about the story at 16 rather than trying to fulfil the vision of the 16-year-old.”

The story in one respect is an ode to Clowes’ relationship with the Spiderman comics of his childhood. With Andy’s red and blue maskcostume and the ‘70s era colours that fill every page, Clowes evokes the superheroes of his childhood to a certain extent.

However, with a power-tripping, anti-hero pro-

tagonist, it’s safe to say that The Death Ray is rooted in more than just nostalgia. Since its release, much emphasis has been placed on the fact that this is Clowes’ first post-9/11 publication.

“I wouldn’t say I was actually trying to make a point. I hope none of my work is actually trying to make a point, that’s not what I’m doing. But I was very informed sort of second-hand, not so much [by] 9/11, but [by the] Iraq War in the years [following],” Clowes clarifies.

“The whole build up to the Iraq invasion affected me emotionally. I just felt powerless, and like I was being lugged by these people whose motives were so impure and so built on revenge and opportunism. I think the Andy character came to sort of personify that a little bit in the story as I was working on it.”

Andy’s world may be of fantasy and villains, but the character ultimately still shares that element of humanity that marks so many of Clowes’ characters. It’s not the first time the artist has

of these aged loners, Clowes turns to one of his real-life muses — his dog.

“She’s … the one living being who I spend the most time with really … I’ve developed this great bond with her, although I realize how it’s utterly fictional and it’s utterly my projection on to her which makes [that bond]. It’s sort of a work of fiction in the way that the comics are, so she sort of fits right into that world.

I realize that if I were to die in my studio, she would happily eat the dog treats out of my pocket and then walk away.”

Since its initial 2004 release, there has been talk of making The Death Ray into a film.

“I had an idea for how to make [this one] into a movie as I was working on it, so I was much more receptive to this one being turned into a movie.”

Having brought two of his works to the screen in the past, Clowes knows not to confirm anything on a movie until it’s “going to be in a theatre on a Friday night.”

Though his experience has brought him some freedom in the production process, there are still many trials when bringing a cartoon to life.

“Even with Ghost World, the drawings [were] more of a distraction than help.

You know, crew members and people tend to look at the comic, and they are trying to replicate it, but you really have to create your own reality in film and you have to start over from scratch. It’s not about bringing something from another medium into the medium of film, it’s about creating a new thing that exists only as a film and doesn’t necessarily have anything whatsoever to do with the work at hand; at least I think so.”

Daniel Clowes garnered an Academy Award nomination for his 2001 screen adaptation of Ghost World. The 2006 film version of Art School Confidential expanded the four-page semi-autobiographical comic that Clowes drew about his experience as an art student in New York City.

The cartoonist, now 50, recalls the somewhat disappointing yet formative experience of starting his artistic career in NYC in the late ‘70s, “when it was still a really dangerous, Taxi Driver-ish city,” Clowes describes with a chuckle. Much like his characters of Art School Confidential would suggest, the classes did not teach him as much as the city itself did, and Clowes can recall a number of figures who inspired him at the time.

“There are so many, you know, cartoonists like Robert Crumb, and Art Spiegelman, and Kim Deitch — people who were kind of doing what I wanted to do Excerpt from Daniel Clowes' The Death Ray but were kind of inventing the field of chosen an adolescent protagonist, either. In fact, underground comics or alt comics and kind of some of his most intricate and mature charac- making it up as I went along. I was very taken ters are protagonists who are under legal voting with them and still am.”

Clowes has since moved from the artistic hotage, whether they're sexually frustrated 10-yearolds or self-aware teens who bemoan the flawed bed of NYC and resides in California with his wife, son, and dog. He’s reached a point in his and immoral world in which they live.

“I guess it always struck me that young char- career where he doesn’t experience that outside acters, teenagers, and children are never given influence on his work.

“I finally feel like I’m self-generated, for better their due in terms of the complexity that lies within them. I remember having very compli- or for worse. I used to always open other books cated thoughts when I was a kid and trying to for inspiration when I was starting. I needed to piece things together that were very mysterious look at other artists to feel like I was trying to and had a hugeness about them … It always ap- in some small way do what they could do. And pealed to me the way in Peanuts the characters really, in the last 10 years I haven’t felt that way; were much smarter than a seven-year-old would I just sit down and [explore] my own disturbed be, they had the awareness of an adult but the inner life.” desires and drives of children, and I think I’m Daniel Clowes will speak at the International Festiconstantly revisiting that concept.”

The Death Ray follows Andy into middle age val of Authors at Harbourfront Centre on October and, much like Wilson, he becomes an intro- 21, 8 pm. spective curmudgeon. For the sole companions For more info visit http://www.readings.org/

12

monday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

VARSITY FEATURES

BIANCA LEMUS LAVARREDA sits down with Microsoft top dog Craig Mundie to talk cyber security, patent wars, and post-secondary education. photos by Bernarda Gospic

features@thevarsity.ca

VARSITY FEATURES

features@thevarsity.ca

monday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

13

Gimme Mundie O

n October 6, U of T’s Department of Computer Science hosted a special lecture by Craig Mundie, the Chief Research and Strategy Officer for Microsoft. His lecture, entitled “Converging Worlds: A New Era in Computing,” addressed how technology is poised to solve the world’s most complex problems.

The Varsity sat down with Mundie to chat before the talk.

The Varsity: Your event poster mentioned that new technologies that are defining the era of computing will help solve some of the world’s most complex challenges.

Are there any specific challenges?

Craig Mundie: One that I worry personally about, and where I think these things may afford us some direction, is providing health care or education for the rest of the world to some extent. The planet today has six and half billion people. Fifty to 100 years from now it will have somewhere between nine and ten billion people… And so, how are we going to scale the current models of education and health care when we can barely do them for the rich people? You know, to a planet that has another six or seven billion people who don’t get any?

I think the answer to that is to realize that the current models won’t do it, but that we will mass produce computerized tutors and doctors that will essentially lower the cost and increase the quality of the care that can be given to those people.

So that’s just an example of where these things will come together.

think, as is the case in any other technology that emerges and that society becomes dependent on, eventually the legislative bodies have to decide where they think the balance of interest lies between something that appears to be a threat and something that appears to be a good.

But whether it’s nuclear power versus nuclear weapons, almost all these technologies have some kind of dual use when you take them to the limit. I just think we’re creating a whole new genre of technologies that you don’t know where to draw those boundaries yet, but we’ll probably try — as we have with everything else.

TV: But what about having a licence to use the internet? I just mention this because there was a quote from you suggesting that people should have some sort of a licence.

CM: I was actually misquoted. I made a comment about this where I was talking about [how] we expect, in other parts of our lives, for people to have credentials. And the point I was trying to make is, in the US or Canada, driving [a vehicle] is a privilege, it’s not a right. You’re given that privilege by being given a driver’s license. And actually, you have some obligations that accrue to you if you’re the owner of the vehicle.

You probably have to have it inspected and maintained and have a license plate and all these other things. Why do we do that? It’s because, if you don’t do that, your car and your ability to drive it are a threat to all the other drivers.

The problem we have in the Internet today is we haven’t [reached a decision about licensing]. It’s now becoming clear that machines that aren’t maintained and the people doing the bad things or who steal your identity — they’re a threat to all the other people. That’s how it’s becoming clear, but we haven’t figured out what the equivalent of a licence plate for your computer is or a driver’s licence for you might be, in order to begin to get a handle on how we want to control these kind of threats — where an individual’s action can be a threat to the global Internet society, if you will. So, I don’t know how that will work out, I don’t think that it will be exactly like the car analogy. But I had offered that as a way to try to get peo-

“People are starting to bump into each other on the highways of the Internet and we don’t really know what we want to do about that yet. We don’t know how bad the problem is.”

TV: Interesting. There has been talk of the possible threat of cyber wars. How practical is the possibility of policing the Internet?

CM: Well, there’s many levels to the Internet. The Internet rides on a physical infrastructure of wires and airwaves. Those things are already regulated by at least each country they operate in. There’s a bigger challenge of how we create some global governance model for these things, that I don’t think anybody has a good idea about yet, but that may have to emerge.

On top of that, we build all these different kinds of applications. I

ple to understand there is an emerging set of problems.

We’ve seen these kinds of things before. When the world had the horse and buggy, and people invented the first cars, legislators hadn’t already decided you needed to have a licence plate for your car and brake inspections and everything else. That only happened when everybody got them and started bumping into each other.

I think … in some ways, people are starting to bump into each other on the highways of the Internet and we don’t really know what we want to do about that yet. We don’t know how bad the problem is. Some of them we know are getting very bad.

The level of criminal activity on the net is very high. The fact that there are no identities on the Internet: this was actually the comment I made in Davos [Switzerland].

If you go down here to the National Bank of Canada and you just walk in the door and say, “I’m an anonymous person, I’m giving you no credentials, but I want to go in the vault please,” they wouldn’t let you in, right? But on the Internet we haven’t created a way you can reliably say who you are.

And so, I think there’s a lot of things that are going to have to come.

Society is becoming completely operationally dependent on this infrastructure, and we’re still trying to figure that out.

TV: There seems to be a patent war between Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Do you see this alleged war hindering innovation in the technology market?

CM: Well, one, I’m not sure I would describe it as a war. This is a normal business process; it goes on between companies, especially big ones, but even big and small companies on a global basis. It becomes particularly evident when you see a lot of new activity in a new space, where there’s a lot of new patents or a lot of new players. So this is not a new thing, it’s just a repeat of things that have happened countless times in other fields, and even in the computer field in the years gone by. So that part’s not anything new.

I think that we’re big believers in intellectual property. It was created with the idea that if you’re willing to exchange knowledge with the society about how you do these things, the society grants you a property right [to that knowledge] for a tem-

porary period of time. It was that trade-off in the large, we think, [that] creates a more innovative environment because everything isn’t necessarily hidden. That’s the bargain that society decided to cut with inventors. This is just the ongoing process of that. These things stabilize fairly quickly, either because companies will go out and invent new things or they’ll buy other companies or merge patent portfolios, and you see all that present in the case that you described now. So, for business people, we think that this is all part of the normal activity, and [in] no way is really stifling innovation.

TV: Technological trends significantly alter how education is delivered; will expectations from technology re-route the structure of

about today, where you just can have a higher level of semantic interaction with the machines and the network, and they become less of a tool and more of a helper. When I talk about, for example, health care or education in the rural poor environment, where there is no teacher and there is no doctor, putting a computer there that presents itself as an avatar or even a robot and that knows how to do diagnoses and give you medical information or becomes a personal tutor — those things, at any level of education, would be transformational.

Look at some of the things that are happening online, like the Kahn Academy work, that just grows virally in terms of its adoption, and many students are using it themselves to supplement the curriculum that is being presented to them in a

post-secondary education?

CM: I think that colleges and universities are already adjusted by the use of technology. I would bet that most of the students here have or use a computer, and probably they all have a smart phone today or will have one relatively quickly. And once that kind of infrastructure diffuses broadly within a community, inevitably, you start to use it for things that you just didn’t do before. So I think that there’s some operational aspects of the classical education systems that have been automated, like any other business automates things.

The posting of grades, the giving of tests, the distribution of homework assignments, whatever they might be: most of these today are all funnelled electronically.

I think that the more fundamental transformations haven’t really started yet, and in fact, probably will require some of the stuff I’ll talk

traditional classroom environment.

The people who are studying [this] are finding that, actually, it may be appropriate to completely invert the model; the classical model where the professor gives a lecture and the students all watch it (and then there’s some [requirement that] they all move at some common pace of learning), may be actually the wrong way. Maybe the right way to do it is that all of the basic training is done through personalized consumption of these lectures, with real-time monitoring of your understanding and a dynamic path through the curriculum in order to maximize your understanding. The faculty is there to provide personal consultation when there is some element of this you just don’t comprehend. That would be a complete inversion of the current model. But certainly people are starting to see interesting results along those lines.

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VARSITY SCIENCE

science@thevarsity.ca

This year’s Nobel Prize winners

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ANDREW JOHNSON provides a breakdown of the 2011 Nobel Prizes in science

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ach year, Nobel Prizes are awarded to industry leaders who have made some sort of cultural or scientific advancement. The prizes are given in honor of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. The prizes have been awarded almost every year since 1901, as requested in Nobel’s will. As of 2011, 853 individuals have received the award for innovations. Each Laureate receives a gold medal, a diploma, and a sum of money that is determined by the Nobel Foundation’s yearly income.

Nobel Prizes awarded to scientific advancement are divided into the following categories: Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine.

A handful of U of T alumni have achieved Nobel Laureate status.

Some people might be aware that a couple of campus buildings are named after U of T Nobel Prize winners Sir Frederick Banting and J. J. R. Macleod for their work with Charles Best in the discovery of insulin as a diabetic treatment. Simi-

larly, 1986 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, John C. Polanyi, has a Toronto District School Board high school named after him. Unfortunately, no U of T alumni received the prize this year.

Nevertheless, the type of brilliance behind past achievements, such as the development of densityfunctional theory and the development of laser spectroscopy was unsurprisingly perpetuated in 2011.

In Physics, the prize was divided amongst three individuals. Saul Perlmutter received half of the award, with the other half divided between Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae. This discovery is an important milestone in cosmology, allowing cosmologist to make exact cosmological parameters. In the 1920s, it was discovered that

the Universe was expanding but it was uncertain at what rate. The rate at which something is expanding depends on how much energy there is. It was once thought that our universe, containing only matter, should eventually surrender to the forces of gravity, but the Physics Laureates find that we are actually accelerating. Their research found that there is an unknown energy source, called black energy in our universe that is driving this rapid expansion. Their findings may have opened up a whole new way of thinking about our universe.

In keeping with the theme of defying nature, Dan Shechtman received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals (crystals with 10 atoms grouped together). Shechtman studied the order of the atoms inside crystals and found non-repetitive regular patterns of atoms. Before Shechtman’s work, the assumption that atom patterns did not repeat themselves had been thought to be a key factor

in crystal formation. Since his discovery, a few natural occurrences of quasicrystals have been discovered.

Surprisingly some of the most durable forms of steel have been found to contain quasicrystals, along with a list of other metals. Shechtman’s finding proves that our understanding of natural processes is always changing and that not all assumptions should be taken as fact.

Like in Physics, the 2011 Prize in Physiology or Medicine was divided amongst three Laureates. Half of the prize was awarded to Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffman for their discovery of the activation of innate immunity. The second half was awarded to Ralph Steinman for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity.

Collectively, the Laureates’ works show us how our body works when it comes to pathogens. Adaptive immunity is the bodies’ ability to remember certain pathogens and strengthen the body’s fight against them the next time they are encoun-

tered. Dendritic cells, discovered by Steinman, are important in immunity because they play an important role in the control of tolerance and immunity.

Sadly Steinman passed away only a few days before the announcement of the Nobel Prize, so the prize was awarded to him post-humorously.

Not everyone has wanted to accept the Nobel Prize. On many occasions, people have rejected receiving the prize, feeling that they did not deserve the award. Conversely, a few Laureates have won multiple prizes. Marie Curie won the award twice for her discovery of radioactivity and in chemistry for the isolation of pure radium.

We still know so little about our world, and the success of these Nobel Laureates serves as motivation for furthering research. As was the case with Shechtman, many of the discoveries made were a complete violation of what was once thought to be the laws of nature. It just goes to show that anything might be possible; you just need to discover it.

SC ENCe n br ef BBM outage leaves many furious in a RIM PR nightmare According to Research in Motion (RIM), the creators of Blackberry mobile phones, the initial reason for the three-day worldwide Blackberry Messenger (BBM) outage was a “core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure.” RIM created a backup switch to deal with data backlog, but unfortunately, the switch did not function as planned. RIM finally managed to clear the backlog and continue global service by

Thursday of last week. To make matters worse, a hoax chain message circulated throughout BBM phones around the same time. It is estimated that RIM services around 70 million BlackBerry users around the world, although it is not known exactly how many were affected.

Many BBM users went to Twitter as a last resort for communication, filling up Twitter feeds with complaints from affected users under the trending topic “#Blackberrymageddon.”

— Bianca Lemus Lavarreda Sources: PC magazine; Wired; RIM

Dead lady comes back to life and is not looking for brains It seems like something out of a horror movie, but it is all too real. In a morgue in Brazil, Rosa Celestrino de Assiss, a patient at the Estadual Adao Pereira Nunes hospital in Rio de Janeiro, spent two hours in a body bag after being pronounced dead.

The patient, in her 60s, was admitted to the hospital for complications with pneumonia and the doctor on call believed she had died. Rosa came to life during a visit from her daughter, Rosangela, who came to the morgue to say goodbye. Rosangela felt her mother breathing as she

gave her mother one last hug and realized that she was still alive. Upon verification that she had indeed been alive the entire time, Rosa was taken back to the intensive care unit less than three hours after she had been declared dead.

There is no explanation for this botched announcement; however, the doctor that pronounced her dead has now resigned.

The misdiagnoses of death have greatly improved as of the 21st century, but it has been suggested that such mistakes still occur 10–15 per cent of the time.

— Tanya Debi Sources: Huffington Post; Stylist; Wired

VARSITY SCIENCE

science@thevarsity.ca

monday, OctOBER 17, 2011

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The brain rules with an iron fist The neural influence governing self-control in society VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR

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Self-control is an essential virtue for a society that needs its citizens to be capable of delaying self-gratification in favour of social norms.

Write for Science!

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The brain is an intricate piece of machinery with billions of neurons that constantly interpret abstract information from the external world. In a recent study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers from the UK and Switzerland have linked self-control to the interaction between two neuronal networks in the prefrontal cortex.

The researchers identified behavioural responses to specific social situations by disrupting the brain using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and then using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for mapping correlations between neural networks involved in decision-making and punishment. Independent of each other, the brain imaging and brain stimulation methods are not able to determine causal mechanisms between the prefrontal brain regions.

The current study fuses these methodologies to harness their synergy. Paired with fMRI, rTMS not only locates behavioural effects from the disruption of parts of the brain but also finds causal mechanisms in that task-related activity of the disrupted region.

The experiment involved disrupting regions associated with complex planning, emotions, and reasoning using rTMS and then

having study participants play an ultimatum game.

The game is essentially a bargaining problem in which players are given an amount of money to distribute with other players. The proposer offers to split the total with the responder who can then accept or reject this offer. If accepted, the players both receive the bargained amount, and if rejected, neither receives anything.

Proposing unbalanced offers is seen as a norm violation in Western culture and was referred to as the baseline for fairness norms.

The game was used to test the participants’ ability to reject normally unfair offers under altered circumstances. When players were disrupted on the right side of their head, they were able to judge whether a deal was unfair but were more likely to accept the offer anyway. Compared to the control group the participants seemed unable to resist self-gratification even while they knew it to be anti-social or deviant behaviour.

It may be the case that cortical areas that render us unable to feel negative emotions towards what we consider unfair makes us much more likely to accept selfgratification. This would signify that the development and association of these emotions with social interaction is a vital part in delaying self-gratification and allowing cooperation with others.

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arts@thevarsity.ca

Self-control is an essential virtue for a society that needs its citizens to be capable of delaying self-gratification in favour of social norms.

In philosophy, psychology, and bargaining theory, self-control is necessary for the formation of agreements because agreements involve someone invoking a temporary loss in exchange for future benefit. Society is built upon these types of repeated interactions: the exchange of our resources to coordinate better outcomes. Civilization, to this end, depends on the delay of self-gratification.

But it is not enough for a better outcome to exist to make it real.

Rules maintain these interactions, and the formation of rules must be related to some cortical processes. Drawing on neurobiology, the researchers in this study have not only searched for neural

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networks expected to be involved in allowing delay of self-gratification but also the rudiminentary cognition involved in the formation of social coordination.

The study faces some limitations by relying on the ultimatum game model since it is a specific type of social interaction with strict assumptions that may not be realistic. Even if we accept the model, inferring preferences from observable behaviour can be problematic — our choices may not necessarily reflect our desires.

Hopefully, these researchers’ findings may be used to explain the implications of brain damage for social deviance and to illustrate the therapeutic use of noninvasive rTMS in the treatment of the persistent antisocial and aggressive behaviours found in some types of psychiatric cases.

business.humber.ca

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VARSITY SCIENCE

science@thevarsity.ca

A peek into the mind’s eye Reconstructing visual experiences by decoding brain activity with fMRI technology Bianca Lemus Lavarreda SCIENCE EDITOR

What might other people’s mental experiences look like? As it turns out, the answer to this question may not lie too far into the future.

Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, published a paper in the September issue of Current Biology that explains how visual experiences of movie trailer clips can be reconstructed with seconds of YouTube video.

The researchers wanted to study how the brain, specifically the early visual system, encodes incoming visual information. The early visual system is the first visual area to receive incoming visual information; it picks up simple features in the environment, such as oriented edges, patches of texture, and motion.

The three participants, who were also co-authors of the study, went inside a functional resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and watched about three hours of Hollywood movie trailers over the course of a few weeks. Data from this single task was taken and used to create a model that would describe how simple features presented in the movies were related to activity at different points in the brain. In total, the researchers measured about 4000 different points of brain activity. To decode the movie trailers seen inside the fMRI machine, they used 18 million seconds of randomly downloaded YouTube videos. YouTube was chosen because it was the quickest way to make a library that was independent of the movies shown in the fMRI machine.

The idea was that the model would reconstruct the movie trailer the participants saw

by using unseen YouTube clips. In response to concerns about overlap, the researchers noted that all the movie trailer clips have common cinematic themes and features present in each of them that complement the YouTube clips.

The YouTube clips were expected to provide variety and reinforce the basic reconstruction of the trailer clips.

The feat of reconstructing visual images with a model derived through brain activity and not neural activity was quite successful.

Functional MRI can measure changes in blood flow and blood oxygen changes subsequent to neural activity and has a very low image resolution, making it excellent equipment for the experiment. Brain blood flow was measured using blood oxygen level-dependent signals, or BOLD signals, in the participants’ occipitotemporal visual cortex. The BOLD signals were ideal since they are indicators of underlying neural activity.

A longstanding problem with BOLD signals is that they are very slow, making it hard for researchers to map brain responses to dynamic stimuli. But with a new motion-energy encoding model, the researchers were able to track BOLD signals as well as use them to decode participants’ visual experiences.

It is important to emphasize that the researchers only decoded the early stages of the visual system and did not take into account the remaining visual areas. A decoding mechanism that combines both the lower and higher hierarchies of the visual system will provide a much clearer and more accurate image. In the visual system hierarchy, the primary visual cortex is concerned with basic features,

michelle yuan/THe VArsity

like the location of edges, where characters are moving in a scene, and basic texture patterns.

This part of the visual system does not register any ‘meaning’ behind the perceived objects.

Higher level parts of the visual system, on the other hand, deal with the semantic elements of the scene (putting a name on whatever it is you are seeing).

The limitations of this study include accuracy of reconstruction — some people might wonder why the images are blurry. However, the researchers did not intend on fine-tuning the decoded brain activity; the resulting images are not very detailed. The authors point out that using quantifiable methods like fMRI makes it easier for researchers to interpret the results of decoding. It should be noted that the videos posted on the lab website have been reconstructed with approximately 10 minutes of data, although the entire study far exceeded that count.

High-tech improvements of this study will not only give science fantasy novel writers something more to add to their plots but can also potentially lead to a reliable reconstruction of typical dynamic visual experiences.

However, it seems that involuntary subjective mental states like dreaming, hallucinations, and memories may be harder to verify as accurate representations due to their nature.

Since the visual system makes up about a third of the human brain, studies like these open doors to understanding the various unique aspects of the visual system and boost the technology available to hospitalized noncommunicative patients. The brain, it seems, is the antenna to visual reality.

VARSITY SPORTS

sports@thevarsity.ca

monday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

17

The joys of intramurals BLUES Intramurals: why should you care?

Alberto Bustamante VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR

With summer fading away, exercise plans and the urge to stay in shape is likely to fade with it. Intramurals can help to fill that ‘fitness’ space on your schedule, but there’s much more to be had from competing than simply getting exercise.

University of Toronto’s Intramural Sports Program organizes over 700 regular-season games and over 100 playoff games annually. It has more than 10,000 participants and is associated with 26 different colleges or faculties at U of T, from the Missis-

in the program each year.

The Mulock Cup is one of many such trophies steeped in history.

Awarded to the championship-winning men’s rugby team, the trophy is the oldest in Canada to be competed for without interruption. It was donated to the University by the Athletic Directorate in honour of Sir William Mulock, the ViceChancellor of the University in 1894.

“To be honest, I never knew the Mulock Cup has the history it’s got,” admitted Kenny Wong, the thirdyear captain of the St. Michael’s College rugby team. “Looking back on it, it’s a lot of history, a lot of tradi-

At a school with such a large and diverse student body intramurals provide an opportunity for students to build friendships outside of the classroom. “[Intramurals] have definitely allowed me to get to know people who I probably wouldn’t hang out with otherwise,” said Wong. “Graduate students, alumni, younger guys … it’s a great place to meet people outside of your normal social circle.”

The Intramural Program appeals to students who live on campus as well as those who commute. “The schedule is not bad, especially for rugby … It’s easy to drive down

Manager of the Intramural Program, Mohsin Bukhari, invites students to “come to our office [at the Varsity Pavilion Centre] and bring … your ideas.” “[Intramurals are] free, which I think is really cool and that’s not always the case at other universities,” noted Sing. “It provides [students] with an opportunity to go outside, be active, and meet other students which I think is really important while you’re in university.

“I think it’s good to sign up for things like intramurals, get some exercise, and meet a bunch of people you probably wouldn’t interact

BY THE NUMBERS 2–4 The women’s rugby team’s record following a 48–0 loss to McMaster in the OUA quarterfinal Saturday.

The team finished fourth in the OUA Russell division to qualify for the game.

4000+ The number of career passing yards amassed by Blues quarterback Andrew Gillis following the Blues’ 9–21 loss to the Western Mustangs, the sixth quarterback to reach that mark for the Blues.

Bernarda Gospic/THe VArsity

sauga and Scarborough campuses to St. George campus colleges and professional faculties such as Pharmacy, Dentistry, Medicine, and Law. The Intramural Program offers a variety of sports for students to participate in, with six co-ed leagues, nine men’s leagues, and eight women’s leagues. The program also includes nine tournaments for sports such as broomball, European handball and squash. There are also two summer leagues and Tri-Campus leagues, where the three U of T campuses compete against each other in a variety of sports.

The program has a long and rich history with leagues having begun as early as the 1890s. A number of prestigious trophies — some over 100-years-old — are contested with-

tion, and certainly something a lot of the colleges take a lot of pride in.”

University students have been competing against each other in numerous other sports for decades, and many of the participants are proud to be involved in intramurals and to continue the tradition of representing their college or faculty in friendly athletic competition.

“I’m so proud to be a part of this amazing program,” said Taryn Grieder, a PhD student in medical science, who has been involved in seven different intramural leagues throughout her 12 years as a student.

“I’m honoured to be captain of a variety of SGS teams and relish the leadership role … Sometimes I think that intramural sports is my parttime job since I play so many!”

How intramurals work...

[for games],” said Kavinda Senanayake, a fourth-year commuter student in his second year as a part of the SMC rugby team. “It’s a chance to meet new people. It’s something different. I never used to play rugby.”

The program also helps students who feel that their program of study limits their opportunities to meet new people. One such case is Tina Sing, a third-year graduate student in the Department of Biochemistry. “Graduate school, it’s a little bit unique,” she said. “I’m in my lab all the time; I don’t really have classes so it’s a good way to meet people outside of your faculty.”

The staff of the Intramural program at U of T are always looking for input from students. Assistant

Involvement in intramurals at U of T is based on your college or faculty. To get involved with a team, get in touch with the intramural representative for your college or faculty, who will then put you in touch with the captain of the team in question.

For some sports, leagues have up to three divisions: Division I, Division II, and Open Division. The Open Division is open for en-

with otherwise.”.

The Intramural Sports Program at U of T has something for everyone.

For over 100 years, it has enriched the experiences of thousands of students and it continues to grow every year.

“I don’t think I could love the Intramural Program at U of T any more. We are very fortunate as students to be able to partake in it, as some schools don’t have such an awesome variety of activities,” said Grieder. “I’ve met some of my best friends and also developed stronger friendships with people from my lab through intramurals.”

For more information on the different U of T intramural leagues and their history, as well as photos, scores, and schedules, visit www.uoftintramurals.ca

trants to form a team of their own and sign up; generally this division only exists in sports with larger leagues.

Depending on the number of teams, leagues have one or more game per team per week with regular-season games determining who advances to the playoffs. The playoffs are single-elimination tournaments.

70 Richard Persaud’s score to finish in a three-way tie for second at the McMaster Marauder’s Invitational, Thursday. The Blues finished fourth overall, with a team score of 298.

1:38:54.1 The Top 5 Times (combined) of the women’s cross country team at the Guelph Open. The men’s and women’s team both finished 6th in their respective categories.

18

VARSITY SPORTS

Monday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

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sports in brief Men’s rugby team wins The Varsity Blues men’s rugby team won their first game this season after the Guelph Gryphons forfeited this week’s fixture.

On October 3, Guelph’s Department of Athletics announced that the Gryphons’ men’s rugby team had been suspended for two regular season games. The decision followed an off-campus incident during an orientation event organized by members of the rugby team, which breached the student athletic code of conduct.

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GLOBAL BUSINESS MANAGEMENT POSTGRADUATE CERTIFICATE

From marketing to finance; from advertising to international trade; this program offers the unique skills you need to launch your career in: • • • • • • •

Marketing Finance Advertising International Trade Retail Wholesale Supply Chain Management

True Peace Sangha offers weekly sessions here at University of mindfulness and meditation Toronto. No charge and all are sessions Mondays here at 5:30 University of welcome.

- 7:30 pm, Toronto. NoCentre, charge second and allfloor. are Multifaith welcome. Mondays 5:30 - 7:30 pm, www.truepeace.ca.

Multifaith Centre, second floor. www.truepeace.ca.

Varsity classifieds Cost $12.00 for twenty-five words. $0.25 Varsity classifieds for each additional word. Rates include Costline $12.00 fortype twenty-five words. $0.25 one of bold for the ad header.

No for each additional Rates include copy changes after word. submission.

Submit one line bold mail typeor forphone. the ad header. ads byof email, Ads mustNo copy changes after submission.

Submit be submitted at least four days prior to ads by email, mail Classifieds, or phone. Ads must publication.

Varsity 21 Sussex be Suite submitted least four Ave, #306,at Toronto, ON,days M5Sprior 1J6. to Call publication. Varsity Classifieds, 21 Sussex 416-946-7604 or email ads@thevarsity.ca.

Ave, Suite #306, Toronto, ON, M5S 1J6. Call 416-946-7604 or email ads@thevarsity.ca.

Athletics, said on the Gryphons’ website. “Our code of conduct related to both on- and off-field activities is very clear, and our expectations of our athletes are very high. The students are well-informed of the code and subsequent consequences.”

Guelph’s forfeiture is good news for the Blues who have lost all five of their games so far, although the default victory is unlikely to impact the standings. The team, however, would have preferred to play the Gryphons. “No team likes to win on a forfeiture,” said Blues’ head coach Paul DiCarmine. “We are building a team, and it’s all about experiencing. We need experience. We need to play.”

—Marie-Violette Bernard With files from gryphons.ca

Friday October 21: 10 am – 8pm Saturday October 22: 10 am – 8pm Sunday October 23: noon – 8pm Monday October 24: 10 am – 8pm

High quality, hand-picked selection. records cds We Major Vinyl & minor musical&genres.

High quality, hand-picked selection. buy and sell. 3 minutes S of College Major & minor18musical genres.

We & St. George, Baldwin.

416-979buy and sell.

3 minutes S of College 2822. Around Again Records. & St. George, 18 Baldwin. 416-9792822. Around Again Records.

CULTURE Monday CULTURE night in canada

sports@thevarsity.ca

business.humber.ca

(No admission charge Fri – Mon)

cash · cheque · debit · Amex · Mastercard · Visa 6 Hoskin Avenue, upstairs in Seeley Hall Museum or St George subway; Wellesley bus 94 to the door 416 · 978 · 6750 www.trinity.utoronto.ca/booksale

Varsity 2011 Friends Book Sale ad Three issues preceding the 20thof October.

sports@thevarsity.ca

VARSITY SPORTS

monday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

19

Western Mustangs ride roughshod over Blues

Andrew Lomasney converts his third field-goal of the game. Lomasney scored all 9 of the Blues points. rob leone/THe VArsity

Zoë Bedard VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR

The Varsity Blues fell 21–9 to the Western Mustangs on a dark, rainy afternoon at Varsity Stadium. Saturday’s defeat left Toronto 3–4 this season.

The Blues came into the game looking to put a stop to their three-game losing streak. They were also hoping to rebound from a 50–14 collapse in Hamilton in week six, a game in which they conceded three late-game touchdowns.

The Mustangs travelled to Toronto for the first of two road games, following a tight 33–29 victory over the Guelph Gryphons the week before. Western moved into first place in the CIS standings with their win over Guelph, after Laval suffered their first loss of the year.

In keeping with October tradition, several players, including the Blues’ Kevin Asare and Aaron Milton, sported pink accessories in honour of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

The Blues got off to a slow start; they

were unable to successfully convert a first-down until their third possession, almost ten minutes into the game.

Western, on the other hand, raced to an early lead following a two-yard run by Tyler Varga which raised his total to 15 touchdowns for the year.

Varga, who left the game with what appeared to be a facial injury in the second quarter, is in his first year out of Kitchener and has now scored a touchdown in each game this season.

The Blues responded to the Mus-

tangs’ early score with 9 unanswered points of their own — all by the foot of Andrew Lomasney — to close out the half. The final three points came on the Blues’ final possession of the half. Helped by a Mustangs pass-interference penalty that advanced the ball across mid-field and a 43-yard completion to Paul de Pass, Toronto marched down the field from their own 39-yard line. The drive ended with a Lomasney 20-yarder which gave the Blues the lead for the first and only time.

Toronto native Lomasney also came good on attempts of 27 and 10 yards.

The Mustangs arrived in Toronto as the number-one ranked offense in Ontario, averaging close to 550 yards a game. The Blues’ defense — second in the league, allowing just 340 yards a game — were a suitable match, and held Western to only a single touchdown in the first half.

The Blues defense hunted the ball with great efficiency throughout the game. Before the half, Toronto was able to secure two takeaways: an Ian Noble fumble recovered by the Blues’ Christopher Johnson and a Nathan Riva loose ball that was pounced on by Jaiden McBride of the Blues in front of the Western team bench.

Unfortunately, the offense was unable to capitalize on their teammates’ exceptional ball awareness, and both possessions ended in punts.

The Blues defense continued their first-half efforts after the break as Willie Sharpe intercepted a Mustang pass deep in Blues’ territory early in the third quarter.

With that interception, one Blues player made history.

Fifth-year quarterback Andrew Gillis entered the game only 173 yards from surpassing 4000 total career passing yards. Toronto-native Gillis achieved the milestone on a 7-yard completion to senior receiver Michael Prempeh,

making him the sixth Toronto quarterback to beat that mark. Gillis finished the afternoon 16 for 36 for 260 yards, including a 43-yard long throw to Ajaxborn Paul de Pass. It wasn’t all smoothsailing though; the quarterback was also picked off by both Horrace Finnikin and Mike Spence.

Western’s offense, led by both dressed quarterbacks Ben Rossong and Ian Noble, quickly ended the home crowd’s celebration. The Mustangs came back with a one-yard Nathan Riva touchdown. It was to be the first of two second-half Western majors, the second coming when Thibaudeau caught a Rossong pass for 20 yards and the touchdown.

Toronto’s special teams were impressive on the day, going 3-for-3 on field goal attempts and totaling 139 yards on punt and kickoff returns. But trailing in the second half and facing a third down, the Blues elected to take their chances on a punt fake. Western anticipated the play and Western player-of-the-game Ricky Osei-Kusi broke into the backfield to tackle Willie Sharpe. The Toronto defense once again adhered to the ageless “bend but don’t break” philosophy and managed to force the Mustangs to attempt a field goal which drifted wide, resulting in a safety.

Toronto’s offensive woes sealed the team’s fate; they were unable to put up any points in the second half or score a single touchdown. Appropriately, the final Blues possession of the game ended when a Gillis pass was intercepted near mid-field. The Mustangs’ offense, held to only 371 yards, returned to the field to take a knee and end the afternoon’s play in Toronto.

The Blues play their final home game of the regular season next Saturday against the University of Waterloo with kick-off scheduled for 1 pm.

Listings

20 monday, OCTOBER 17, 2011

events calendar Monday

Here Be Monsters Daniels Student Exhibition, a collaborative effort between Graduate Architecture, Landscape and Design Student Union (GALDSU) and Daniels Faculty.

9 am–5 pm Eric Arthur Gallery (Daniels Faculty of Architecture, 230 College St.)

NEXUS + 2X10 Concert Faculty of Music Faculty Arts Series.

7:30–9:00 pm, $20 for students Walter Hall (Edward Johnson Building, 80 Queen St.)

tuesday

Career Centre — Stress, strategies, and success: A workshop for students in the final years Offered jointly by the Academic Success Centre and the Career Centre.

2–4 pm Academic Success Centre (Koffler Building, 214 College St.)

The Magic and Mystery of Theatre

wednesday

Varsity Blues women’s and men’s soccer vs.

Trent University Women at 6:30 pm AND men at 8:30 pm Varsity Centre (299 Bloor St. West)

Varsity Blues men’s hockey vs. Ryerson University 7:30 pm Varsity Arena (299 Bloor St. West)

The Varsity

October 17 to 21 thursday

Methods and Motivations in Interventionist Art — Paper Airplane Workshop 1–6 pm Hart House (7 Hart House Circle)

Powerpoint and Classroom Presentations (TATP) 10 am–12 pm 4057 Robarts Library (130 St. George St.)

Featuring theatre critic Lynn Slotkin, the lecture is part of the Alumni Cafe series.

6:30–8:00 pm, $5 for students Walters Lounge (Woodsworth College Residence, 321 Bloor St. West)

Callout for Nominations !

The Varsity is calling out for motivated student leaders to run for its Board of Directors!

The duty of the Board of Directors is to act as student oversight for the Varsity’s financial and legal well-being as well as to help set long term goals for the corporation. Individual duties of directors can include consideration and monitoring of the annual budget, selection of staff, and discussion of ongoing issues of the corporation at monthly board meetings.

Available Positions 2 Professional Faculty Directors 1 University of Toronto Mississauga Director 1 University of Toronto Scarborough Director Please complete and submit a completed nomination form to the Varsity Offices at 21 Sussex Ave, 2nd floor no later than Friday, October 21. Forms can be downloaded from the Varsity website and picked up from the Varsity Office.

The Election will take place on Thursday, October 27.

This is an exciting opportunity to get involved in a large and dynamic student group, while gaining experience and skills that are applicable to other campus organizations.

friday

Varsity Blues women’s hockey vs. Brock University 7:30 pm Varsity Arena (299 Bloor St. West)

The Gentleman Caller 8–10 pm, $18 for students Hart House Theatre (7 Hart House Circle)