An interdisciplinary team of SFU students has won the Sustainability Trophy in nwHacks, an engineering competition or “hackathon,” for their sustainable paper towel dispenser they have dubbed “PullMeNot.”

The invention dispenses paper towels while displaying the impact of consumption to the user and collecting data to help businesses and organizations make more sustainable choices.

Siv Padhy, a fourth year communications student, said that the dispenser “does two things. On the front end, it shows [the] immediate impact of waste in using paper to the user. On the back end, it tracks data on usage for businesses and organizations to use for their own needs.”

The dispenser tells the user via a screen how many paper towels they have used in real time, the monetary cost to the organization, as well as the total carbon dioxide emissions that would be released if everyone used the same amount.

It uses Wi-Fi modules to communicate this information to a server. Padhy explained the strength of this feature in comparison to the water bottle filling stations which, in part, inspired their idea: “The problem with those is that they are not networked, meaning [that] they don’t send data anywhere.”

Hacks is the largest hackathon in Western Canada. This year the theme was “sustainability” and there were judges from Google, Facebook, and Apple. The hackathon occurred over three days, non-stop with little time for sleep. Padhy remarked, “It’s kind of like finals but even harder.”

Padhy said that the team, which included arts, computing science, and business students, used their diverse backgrounds to their advantage.

“We said ‘let’s build something cool, but let’s have some impact tied to it,’” Padhy continued, “Something that quite clearly, even if you weren’t an engineer, you could see some value in it. So that’s what kind of set us apart.”

The PullMeNot team plans to further develop their project “horizontally” and “vertically.” Essentially, they want to improve the design of their dispenser to make it better suited to a customer’s needs. They also want to expand into other products.

Richard Arthurs, a first year mechatronic systems engineering student, explained, “One of the important takeaways is that this doesn’t stop at paper towel. It’s just kind of the beginning. We have to make sure our modules — the stuff that deals with the Wi-Fi — can connect to any sort of sensor for something we want to measure. [. . .] If we have a modular system, half the work is already done when we want to monitor something else.”

On the business end, they are currently in talks to pilot the project at SFU’s Surrey campus. Arthurs explained that they are looking into optimizing the dispenser for manufacturability, power use, and ease of installation. Team member Steven Huang is developing a web-based dashboard which will illustrate data to the customer by using graphs and tables.

Padhy commented, “It’s one thing to be able to track anything and everything but if it’s not useful it’s just noise. From a social point of view, we want to make sure we’re equipping people with the type of info they need to reduce consumption both on a consumer scale and a larger scale.”

He continued, “On the front end — consumption — we can immediately show people their impact on a larger scale beyond just their action. The analogy I like to use is: if 7 billion people threw one penny into a pot, that’s a lot money.”

The problem is, as Padhy laid out, “No one sees the penny or the pot.”

Recent research from SFU archaeologists suggests that back pain is linked to walking upright on two legs.

The findings show that some people with vertebrae more similar in shape to the ancestral chimp are less adapted to bipedalism, and more likely to experience back pain.

SFU archaeology’s Kimberly Plomp and Mark Collard co-authored a paper titled, “The ancestral shape hypothesis: An evolutionary explanation for the occurrence of intervertebral disc herniation in humans,” along with colleagues Una Strand Viðarsdóttir, Darlene Weston, and Keith Dobney. It notes that humans are more susceptible to back pain than non-human primates due to their two-legged way of walking.

Plomp captured the vertebrae shape of 71 humans, 36 chimpanzees, and 15 orangutans. She found that human vertebrae with a pathological lesion called the Schmorl’s node are closer in shape to chimpanzee vertebrae than human vertebrae without the lesion.

“What I was capturing was the shape of the vertebral bodies and the pedicles,” Plomp noted. “One of their biomechanical functions is to withstand compression. [With] bipedal locomotion we put a lot of pressure on our spines, especially if we lift something heavy,” she said.

Walking on two legs “increases the compression happening on our vertebra, and these particular shapes that we’ve identified as being closer to chimpanzees may not be the right shape to properly withstand the amount of stress placed on a spine due to bipedalism,” she explained.

Chimpanzees are the closest out of the apes to human beings, sharing about 98 per cent of our DNA. Humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, from which they are believed to have split from eight to nine million years ago.

“Every modern human is fully evolved. We think that this shape represents an ancestral shape,” she said. “Since we both seem to share this shape — humans who have this condition and chimpanzees — we hypothesize that this shape is probably from that shared common ancestor. [. . .] They were likely quadrupedal.”

The paper conclusively links the shape of human vertebrae with that of chimpanzees, but Plomp mentioned that they are considering other possibilities.

“The vertebral shapes associated with Schmorl’s nodes may be a consequence of intervertebral disc herniation [a tearing and consequent bulging along the spine] rather than its cause,” the paper stated. “However, we do not consider intervertebral disc herniation causing changes in vertebral shape to be a good explanation for our results.”

Plomp noted that the research is still in its early stages, but that there may be clinical benefits.

She hopes for the development of “methods [that] might be able to be used in clinical research to identify people — especially high risk individuals like athletes — [who] might be more prone to back problems.”

SFU’s Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU) commenced job action after serving a 72-hour strike notice to university administration on April 16.

The TSSU is made up of over 1,500 members and represents teaching assistants, tutor markers, sessionals, and the English Language and Culture/Interpretation and Translation Program (ELC/ITP) instructors. The union has been bargaining for over a year now, since its collective agreement with the university expired on April 30, 2014.

TSSU members voted in March with 92 per cent in favour of strike action. The strike mandate allows the union to initiate job action and put pressure on SFU without withdrawing all services.

ELC/ITP instructors are now implementing an overtime ban that will continue indefinitely. The TSSU has communicated the intention to perform further job action as necessary.

As per a request by SFU, an Essential Services Order was put into place on April 21 in order to obligate all SFU staff to maintain operation of the powerhouse and animal care facilities during job action.

The university has confirmed three additional days of bargaining over May 13–15. TSSU chief steward Reagan Belan shared her hopes for these negotiations, stating that the union has been “very vocal about wanting more dates.

“What would be great is if we had meaningful exchanges and actual questions or criticisms about our proposals,” she said.

SFU administration responded in an online update with their own wishes for the upcoming bargaining talks: “We hope those meetings will be productive in advancing proposals and moving toward a mutually agreed Collective Agreement that supports a strong student-[focused] and sustainable learning and research environment across all SFU campuses.”

Belan commented that there has been little direct response from the university regarding their particular requests. “We haven’t really heard any sort of criticism or complaints when we ask for questions or problems that could result from the implementation of that language,” she said.

“Then we can start to amend our proposals to take into account those types of operational realities.”

Some of the TSSU members’ key issues that Belan emphasized were seniority for long-time staff who currently have to reapply each semester, benefits for ELC/ITP members equal to other staff, as well as an improved hiring system.

The university has recognized some of the union’s concerns in their published statements and have expressed the intention of “setting the record straight” in regards to employee benefits, timely remuneration, and safety training for staff.

Administration also added, “We would strongly prefer to avoid any disruption to our students’ academic pursuits or our broader SFU community.”

In a press release, TSSU spokesperson George Temple noted that, “Over the last decade we’ve seen class sizes and workloads increase while funding hasn’t kept pace.

“As SFU approaches its 50th anniversary, our members demand that Senior Administration recommit itself to SFU’s stated mission: to provide quality education and research.”