Word on the Street: NHL Playoffs

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June 3, 2013

Notes from the latest SFSS board of directors meeting.

By Alison Roach

Build SFU committees

Members of the new SFSS board were appointed to committees in the Build SFU project, a Build SFU Joint Steering Committee and a Build SFU Building Committee. External relations officer Chardaye Bueckert and treasurer Emad Shahid were voted into the joint steering committee, while Bueckert, president Humza Khan, and business faculty representative Brandon Chapman were named to the building committee.

Fontaine also recommended that the newly formed Build SFU Project Committee be downsized and made to have less board representation with more members of the student community at large to take seats. The project committee will be discussing the large scale communication and consultation process that will be put in motion in the fall.

Studentcare mobile app

SFSS President Humza Khan gave a report on a Studentcare stakeholder conference attended by himself and several other board members recently, where they spoke to the SFSS healthcare provider about issues around privacy, timeliness, and accessibility. Khan announced the release of a mobile app by the healthcare provider that has been developed through the suggestion of SFSS members who attended the conference the previous year.

The app is currently only available for iPhones, and allows students to file claims, check their claim history, get information on their coverage, and receive refunds through direct deposit. The app allows quick processing, with claims going through within five business days. With the current physical mailing system, claims can take from two weeks to a month the process. The app is available for free on iTunes under the name “ihaveaplan mobile.”

Out on Campus budget increased

The Financial and Administrative Services Committee (FASC) of the SFSS recommended to the board to increase the Out on Campus student administrator wages by $5,300, and the EI / CPP / WCB expenses by $450. These increases are to be taken from the unrestricted surplus. The motion was easily approved by almost all board members, with only one abstention.

burns-i-view: Doomed

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June 3, 2013

By Stephen Kloppenburg

A Strained Encounter

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June 3, 2013

By Sajid Akhtar

The following encounter is the result of a simple search for a little salvation on Burnaby Mountain. After running rectangles around the Academic Quadrangle and the rare failure of Google to provide me with an answer, I ended up having to turn for help to the only one who could help me in this hour of need . . . some girl hanging out in the hallway.

Me: “Hello, can you please tell me where the Interfaith Center is . . .”

Stranger: “Center? Do you mean Center to play?”

Me: “No, no! Interfaith Center . . . where people go to pray”

Stranger: “Play? If you want to play you go to the East Gym”

Me: “No, pray! . . . P-R-A-Y”

Stranger: “You can play in the gym, the field … where do you want to play?”

Me: I don’t want to play . . . I want to pray!

*I put both hands together in aggression and did a typical praying gesture*

Stranger: “Yes, play, with an l, I know, if you go to the East G . . .”

Me: “No! Not play, PRAY! With an r!”

*Shaking my head profusely, I then demonstrated at least 4 variants of praying based on different religions*

Stranger: “You’re looking to . . . go to a play?”

Me: No, PRAY! P-R-A-Y!!!

Stranger: “Play?”

*Frustrated to no end I decided to make one final attempt to get through to her*

Me: “DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD!?!”

Needless to say she did not lead me to the Interfaith Center. I still don’t know why my request was so hard to understand . . . whatever, I guess I’ll just have to pray for her. That is if I ever actually find the Interfaith Center. . .

Stranger: “What? You’re going to play for me? Just go to the East Gy . . .”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Interfaith Center is located in the Academic Quadrangle just around the corner from the Physics entrance to SHRUM Science Center. This could be useful information both for anyone looking to pray as well as anyone interested in not being yelled a by someone looking for it.

SFU researchers could relieve pine beetle problem

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June 3, 2013

White spruce genomic maps may have huge effect on BC forestry

By Joel Mackenzie
Photos by Flickr

A group of Canadian scientists, including Steve Jones and Inanc Birol from SFU, have developed genome maps for the white spruce tree, a tree that is very common in British Columbia and important to the BC forestry industry.

Genome maps are orders of the genetic makeup of living beings. They assign DNA fragments to chromosomes, allowing researchers to identify specific traits that plants or animals have. The maps would greatly help by speeding up the process of selective breeding for the trees.

Jones, an SFU molecular biology and biochemistry professor, spent several years with the research team developing the software to find this information, and spent the last year and a half sequencing the spruce genome.

Jones said that those in the forestry industry will be able to identify the genes responsible for the certain traits a tree has, and therefore can ensure that “the trees they plant are the most suited to that particular region and will be more likely to develop into mature trees.”

Selective breeding has been used “for the last 10,000 years,” explained Birol, a computing science adjunct professor at SFU. “Before this research, breeders had to make educated guesses for the properties of the seedlings, then they would have to wait a number of years to measure the results on mature trees, and repeat.

“This research cuts down the waiting time between breeding cycles considerably, perhaps from 25 years to 5 years.” This information could be used to solve major environmental problems as well, specifically the destruction caused by the Mountain Pine beetle in BC over the last few years.

According to a report by the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations, in 2001, the Mountain Pine beetle damaged almost 800,000 hectares of forest in BC. This amount continued to increase yearly, reaching over 18 million hectares of damaged forest by 2011; which included a substantial amount of commercially valuable pine, and was combated with a multi-million dollar Mountain Pine Beetle Action Plan implemented in 2001.

“The white spruce represents a significant percentage of the trees in those forests and across Canada,” noted Birol.“That’s why understanding the spruce biology at the genomic level will allow us to protect them against changing conditions and their effects.”

The Mountain pine beetle has become more prevalent in Canada in recent years due to the fact that the BC interior has recently not experienced the extreme winter weather which killed vast amounts of the beetles in the past; the last such weather event occurred in 1995 / 96.

There is also a dramatically higher amount of healthy trees in BC, as a result of BC’s wildfire management program being established in the last century. The research team’s hopes to combat this epidemic with this new genome research.

While Birol says that in the very competitive field in which this research is taking place, their Canadian project “has the most bang for the buck!” as it is “the first to report a genome at this level of construction.”

He added, “We are not done yet . . . just like the human genome, it will take several more years to ‘complete’ the spruce genome. And, it is a worthy effort, where competitors have to — and will — work together to accomplish.”

Collective Agreement negotiations continue

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May 27, 2013

Unrest within SFU’s unions not over yet

By David Dyck
Photos by Vaikunthe Banerjee

CUPE 3338 met with the university to continue bargaining for a new collective agreement several weeks ago, but according to the union, no tangible progress was made. CUPE 3338 unit 1, represents approximately 1,000 university staff members in a range of different positions such as library assistants, computer operators, store clerks, and others.

Even though the employees’ current contract expired over three years ago, there has been little progress over negotiations. A CUPE press release quoted CUPE 3338 president Lynne Fowler as calling the university’s last offer “insulting.” And in an interview with Fowler, she described the negotiations as going “very slowly.”

According to CUPE, the “insulting” offer was 0.5 per cent pay increases in the last two years of a four-year agreement. The union claimed that the offer was 75 per cent less than staff wages doing the same jobs at other BC universities.

Although no new meeting has been set up between the two parties as of print time, Fowler stated that this was primarily a result of scheduling conflicts. The university refused to comment on the negotiations; it is university policy to keep any comments private until an agreement is reached.

The last major labour event at SFU happened recently with the signing of a new collective agreement with the TSSU — the Teaching Support Staff Union. The university had been unsuccessfully fighting a bad faith bargaining ruling from the Labour Relations Board since January of this year.

Pollsters not to blame for innacurate election prediction: Angus Reid

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May 27, 2013

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Media messages leading up to election could have influenced voter responsibility

By Alison Roach
Photos by Flickr

After the 2013 BC provincial election ended with a surprising Liberal victory, many are looking for something to blame the shock on, and landing on the polls.

Heading into campaigning, the BC Liberals were trailing the BC NDP by a significant 20 per cent, according to the Angus Reid poll, an online poll of 809 BC adults that found 48 per cent of decided voters were confirmed or leading towards supporting the NDP.
However, in reality the BC Liberals — headed by Christy Clark — won a majority government on May 14, winning 44.4 per cent of the popular vote and 50 of the province’s 85 riding, in what CBC News called “one of the most remarkable political comebacks in the province’s history.”

The vast difference between the advanced polling predictions and the results have some pointing fingers at the polls themselves. Angus Reid himself — author of the popular Angus Reid poll and poller for CTV and The Globe and Mail — failed to predict the election results, but doesn’t believe the polls were wrong. His final poll on that Monday had the Liberals still trailing the NDP by nine per cent.

According to The Globe and Mail, Reid thinks the polls simply missed the late Liberal surge, but did say, “I think there’s going to be a healthy skepticism for a while about polling. I don’t think the industry can completely dodge this one as it looks at trying to establish credibility going forward.”

Dr. Joti Samra, a clinical psychologist and adjunct psychology professor at SFU, says the disparity in the polls may have misled the voters themselves, and the message they were receiving in the days and weeks leading up to election day. Samra believes a phenomenon called diffusion of responsibility may have discouraged voters from making it out on election day.

“When we’re place in situations where there’s others involved and we perceive that others will be taking some kind of action toward an outcome, we tend to be less likely to adopt individual kinds of responsibility,” Samra said in an interview with The Peak; “Our sense of individual responsibility goes down as the size of the group goes up.”

Samra suspects that as the public was bombarded with the message of an imminent NDP win, many individuals perceived that their vote would not sway the election away from that outcome.

“People tend to be more likely to take inaction, not necessarily because they’re apathetic about it, or they’re indifferent about it, but because they think that there’s not going to be an impact of their particular behaviour,” Samra explained. She went on to say that if the reports from the polls showed a closer election, the end result may have been different.

According to Samra, the way to mitigate the effect of diffusion of responsibility would be to qualify the messages that we hear in the media leading up to an election.

She concluded, “What needs to be underscored is that it’s a sample, it’s a prediction, and by definition that prediction is not perfect. It has the potential to be skewed by a number of factors, and we really have a real life example of that now.”

Shut Up and Listen: Voting Turnout

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May 27, 2013

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SFU students discuss voting turnout in BC, check it out!

Hosted by Estefania Duran

Filmed and edited by Julian Giordano

BCIT considers university accreditation

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May 27, 2013

Currently, the institution is only able to issue a Bachelor of Technology

By Neetu Garcha
Photos by Flickr

VANCOUVER (CUP) — After some BCIT students had problems getting into master’s degree programs with their BCIT certification, the institution is now looking at becoming an accredited university.

Barry Hogan, BCIT’s senior director of program development, says the idea has not been pitched externally but there is talk of the institution’s need to make some changes when it comes to program recognition across the country and internationally — or becoming a university.

Hogan told The Link that when BCIT started in 1964 and likely through most of the 1980s, most of the graduates stayed in the Lower Mainland, but this is not the case anymore. “Now everyone is more mobile and we’ve got graduates that are moving around and students that didn’t finish here want to apply their credits somewhere else,” he explained.

Paul Dangerfield, BCIT’s vice president of education, said the talks of BCIT becoming a university came up during discussion of the 2014 to 2019 strategic plan. Dangerfield said the idea was brought up informally over a decade ago. “It’s one of those topics that have been chatted about over the last probably 10 or 15 years at BCIT as other colleges become universities,” he said.

Hogan said when BCIT was given degree-granting status in 1994, the only degree the institution was allowed to issue was a Bachelor of Technology (B-Tech). The idea was brought up informally over a decade ago.

“We keep getting trapped by one of three buckets: we are not a university, we are not a part of the Association of Universities and Colleges Canada and people wondering, ‘What the heck is a B-Tech?’” said Dangerfield. The Association of Universities and Colleges Canada (AUCC) is an organization that represents Canada’s colleges and universities.

There is no national accreditation in Canada, so one province may not necessarily know another province’s policies around accreditations, according to Hogan, and as a result of this lack of national accreditation, there are a few assumptions that institutions tend to default to. For example, “. . . if you’re a university, you must be better and if you’re a member of the AUCC,” said Hogan. “So, we’re getting the short end of the stick.”

Electrical engineering and technology student Harjinder Kandola told The Link that BCIT becoming a university would help eliminate problems students face trying to transfer their BCIT credits to other institutions. “As far as the student perspective goes, I think it would be a really good idea — more so if it were to get recognition and accreditation from the government,” said Kandola.

Kandola personally has looked into the idea of transferring into a degree program at other institutions, only to realize he would have to take at least a semester of bridging courses in order to do so.

“That’s another semester or two down the drain and that’s kind of discouraging to say the least,” said Kandola.“If BCIT was a university I think the transition to a degree program would be more straightforward, rather than taking a bridging program which kind of defeats the purpose of transferring in the first place.”

Dangerfield said the institutions governance structure would not change if it were to become a university. “In our preliminary examination of this process, it appears BCIT would not have to change our current governance structure,” said Dangerfield.

As for the name of the institution, it is not mandatory for it to change to BC University of Technology, or something to represent that it has changed to a university. Hogan said a name change is not appealing to the community because of the brand equity of the BCIT name.

The research is still in the very early stages, but Hogan speculates if BCIT does in fact become a university, it would be about a three year process.

University Briefs

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May 27, 2013