Every year, U of T faculty members generate hundreds, maybe thousands, of ideas. Sometimes, as with James Till and Ernest McCulloch’s discovery of stem cells in the early 1960s, they change how we think about the world.

The sparks of ingenuity you’ll read about here are new. They could one day affect our health or the environment, or cast new light on concepts such as honesty, justice and privacy. And although it’s still unclear how far they’ll reach, they show that the spirit of inquiry burns brightly at U of T. We hope you enjoy.

Computers that Understand Speech

New software can condense long spoken-word recordings into a few key highlights

Ever since Star Trek first aired, we’ve imagined a world where we could simply talk to our computers and listen to their replies, without the clunky diversion of typing and reading. Suppose, for example, that you missed an important meeting: wouldn’t it be great if a computer could just tell you what the highlights were?

Gerald Penn, a professor of computer science, has been working toward this goal. His specialty is “speech summarization” – not by the traditional method, which would require a human to transcribe every word spoken, but rather an automated process that uses audio recordings of the events themselves, bypassing text altogether.

Penn is developing software that can listen to an audio file (an MP3 of a recorded speech, for example) and keep track of pauses, emphasis and repeated words – what he calls “recurring acoustic patterns.” The software then uses those indicators to condense the audio recording into a new, shorter file that contains the most salient points of the original. And it can do it quickly, too, processing a one-hour recording in just a few minutes.

Until now, Penn says, you would have had to make do with a textual summary. But a text-based summary requires a transcript, and these are time-consuming if done manually and typically error-riddled when done by a computer program. Even if speech-recognition programs were error-free, a perfect transcript would hold little appeal, given that human speech is full of “ums” and “ahs,” sentences that seem to change gear in the middle, and strings of words and phrases that generally flout the rules of grammar. A condensed audio file, in contrast, still conveys the key message of a given speech, Penn says, without sounding jarring to the ear.

Potential demand for the software could come from any field where short summaries of spoken-word content are required – such as businesses that need brief accounts of speeches or news broadcasts; students who need summaries of lectures at exam time; or even government security agencies on the lookout for signs of criminal activity in phone conversations.

The next step, Penn says, will be to compare computer-generated summaries with those generated by humans, to see how well they match up – bearing in mind that human listeners might not agree with each other about what the most important points in a given speech were. Collaborations with colleagues in psychology are a possibility. “We need to consider what artificial intelligence is all about,” he says.
– Dan Falk

DNA and Diet

Why can some people drink all the coffee they want and others can’t? The answer may be genetic

Reducing your salt intake could save your life – or imperil it. It depends on your genes. Same thing with coffee: four cups a day could be divine for me but dangerous for you. How can we know? At the moment, it isn’t easy. But that’s something Dr. Ahmed El-Sohemy, a professor in the Faculty of Medicine, is working to change.

El-Sohemy holds the Canada Research Chair in Nutrigenomics, which is a branch of nutritional science that explores how the nutrients we consume interact with our genes to affect our health. His research has bolstered the idea that our genetic makeup determines in part how we react to certain foods. In 2006, for instance, El-Sohemy and his colleagues published a startling paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association about coffee drinkers. People with a particular gene variant metabolize caffeine slowly. So whereas genetically “fast” metabolizers can drink all the coffee they want with impunity, slowpokes under the age of 50 have a four-fold increased risk of heart attack when they imbibe four or more cups per day. And, lest you think you can tell your genotype by whether the dark stuff keeps you up at night, that effect is totally unrelated, he says.

This is the sort of useful genetic detail we’d all like to know about ourselves. Luckily, El-Sohemy and others are at work on a personalized nutrigenomics test kit. In addition to pinpointing our caffeine risk, the test will reveal whether we will be deficient in vitamin C if we don’t take the recommended daily allowance of 75 to 90 milligrams and whether we should curb our salt habit. Guidelines tend to focus on the upper and lower limits, he points out, but not the individual: “You are just one point in the range,” he says.
– Alison Motluk

Restoring a Way of Life

Did the settlers take more than land from North America’s indigenous peoples?

When one person is wronged by another, our sense of fairness demands that the injustice be corrected. If someone steals your car, at the very least you deserve to get your car back. But when it comes to historical injustices committed by one group against another – say, European settlers against indigenous North Americans – there’s little agreement about what to do.

One influential argument is that historical injustices can’t really be redressed. Jeremy Waldron, a professor of law and philosophy at the New York University School of Law, has argued that historic claims from past injustices weaken as time passes. In the case of indigenous peoples, Waldron contends that the descendants of the European settlers have gradually built a legitimate claim to the land that their ancestors took.

Douglas Sanderson, a U of T law professor studying the issue of justice for groups that have suffered historical wrongs, disagrees. He says claims to justice don’t fade because of the passing of time, in part because today’s indigenous people are still suffering – the injustice is ongoing. Nor can the injustice be corrected simply by restoring stolen land.

“My view is that what settler people took from indigenous people was the capacity to live lives that are meaningful to indigenous people as indigenous people,” says Sanderson, who is a member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation.

He imagines what life would be like for modern indigenous people who had maintained their independence even as settler society grew up around them. They would drive cars, use roads, live in houses and work for wages. But their institutions – government, schools, health care – would affirm their traditional cultures. For example, a Cree child-welfare system would place neglected children in the extended family context of the clan system, rather than in foster homes with strangers. Leaders might be elected through public consensus, rather than secret ballot. A right to vote might be tied to a traditional coming-of-age ceremony, rather than simply a birthday.

Justice means allowing modern indigenous people to live in the way they would have if the injustices had never been done in the first place. Sanderson’s vision would require a change in Canadian laws to give indigenous people more legal, political and cultural autonomy.

“I have to believe that at some point down the road there’s some set of policies where in the end settler people and indigenous people can look at each other across the table and say, ‘OK, we’re even,’” says Sanderson. “There just has to be a way of getting there.”
– Kurt Kleiner

Toxic Cleanup

Plants and bacteria do a pretty good job of cleaning up our noxious messes. But which of these organisms are most effective? And under what conditions?

Humans have been releasing chemicals into the environment for years, and the Earth does a fairly good job of breaking these down over time. But what if we could speed up the natural process? What if we could determine precisely which bacteria and plants eliminated toxins such as PCBs and pesticides from the environment the fastest?

That’s the ultimate goal of Roberta Fulthorpe, a professor in the department of physical and environmental science at U of T Scarborough. So far, researchers have only studied the way bacteria take apart toxins in contaminated areas. But Fulthorpe says there are possibly hundreds of species of bacteria living in uncontaminated soil that scientists have never encountered. Her research aims to uncover some of these.

Fulthorpe has previously studied the genetic diversity of bacteria in areas contaminated by pulp-and-paper waste-treatment systems. She also hopes to study plant tissues, which contain bacteria that can aid in breaking down toxins. “We know it’s common for plant tissue to have non-harmful bacteria, but we don’t know what they do,” she says.

At the moment, it takes many years for natural processes to break down organic pollutants. So when contaminated land is being considered for residential or commercial uses, developers are often unwilling to wait. They simply scoop up the toxic soil and ship it somewhere else, or use other chemicals to scrub the more toxic ones away. Finding a faster way to clean up the soil naturally would have plenty of practical uses, says Fulthorpe, and lead to a cleaner habitat for all.
– Sarah Boesveld

Clean Power

Solid oxide fuel cells are more reliable than wind and more efficient than solar. Now if only they were cheaper . . .

As countries around the world try to cut their greenhouse gas emissions while still satisfying a growing demand for electricity, interest in wind and solar energy has soared. But each has its challenges: energy from the wind is unreliable and solar energy is inefficient. Most photovoltaic cells convert only 15 per cent of the light energy that falls on them to electricity, which limits the amount of power that can be produced within a small space, such as a rooftop.

Olivera Kesler, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, is conducting research into solid oxide fuel cells – an alternative energy source that produces electricity using a variety of naturally occurring gases, such as methane and propane. Solid oxide fuel cells do not make sulphur dioxide or nitrogen oxide – common air pollutants – and are four times as efficient as photovoltaic cells at converting energy to electricity. They also use half as much fuel and create half as much carbon dioxide as coal-fired generators (to produce the same amount of electricity).

But some technical challenges must be solved before solid oxide fuel cells will be adopted widely. The cells must be made cheaper to produce and more durable. To accomplish this, Kesler and her students are creating supports for the cells made from stainless steel and fabricating new fuel cell structures with the aim of maximizing electricity production while lowering cost.

The lab is working with a Canadian industrial partner to see if the fuel cell structures can be developed and marketed to companies that buy equipment to make electricity. Eventually, they may be used in homes, industrial sites – and even cars.
– Sarah Boesveld

Making Drugs Safer

By identifying all the proteins a drug acts on in yeast, researchers may be able to better predict unwanted side-effects in humans

Most drugs on the market were discovered serendipitously. And even ones we use every day aren’t well understood. Pharmaceutical companies tend to know a lot about how a drug affects the particular protein it targets. But the human body has some 20,000 genes, each encoding its own protein. They may know little about what other proteins the drug affects.

Guri Giaever, a chemical geneticist at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, has devised a way to figure that out – using yeast. The yeast genome was sequenced in 1996. It was the first organism to have every letter of its DNA instruction manual spelled out. Scientists immediately realized, though, that it wasn’t enough to know what the genes were: they had to know what they did. So 16 labs around the world (Giaever worked in the lead one) collaborated to systematically knock out each of the 6,000 genes one at a time, to understand their functions.

Using these “knockout” yeast strains, Giaever developed a unique platform for testing drugs in live yeast. “We can study a drug’s effects on all the proteins at the same time,” she says. True, it’s not a human, but roughly 70 per cent of the essential genes have a strong human homologue. “It’s humbling how many genes we share,” she says.

Giaever’s system works by growing all 6,000 knockout strains together, bathing them in the drug molecule of interest, then seeing which cells thrive and which do poorly. Each strain has a unique “bar code,” made of a 20-base-pair string of DNA, which makes it possible for the researchers to separate the flourishing cells from the floundering.

One way the system is used is to help drug companies better understand how their own drugs work. For a drug that requires regulatory approval, for instance, a company might need information on what is causing an unwanted side-effect. Giaever’s system can identify other yeast proteins affected by the drug and thus throw light on the mechanism behind the undesired effect.

Giaever and her collaborators are also screening drugs that have been approved for use to see if they can be “repurposed.” They identify all the proteins the drug acts on, and then make that information available to researchers who might see how that action could help combat disease. There’s a lot of potential. All the drugs out there, she says, only target about 300 proteins out of 20,000 or so produced in humans, leaving plenty more to be investigated.
– Alison Motluk

An Electronic Veil

We routinely give away more information about ourselves than we need to. Digital identification could help us keep personal details under our control

Showing identification to prove who we are – or that we have the credentials to engage in a particular activity – is something we do almost every day. But in showing our ID, we usually reveal more about ourselves than we need to, says Andrew Clement, a professor in the Faculty of Information. A liquor-store clerk might demand to see a driver’s license for proof of age, but all he really needs to know in most cases is the year of birth. Similarly, a health-club supervisor only needs to know that the person wanting to enter the facility is a member in good standing. She doesn’t need to know the member’s name.

So far, people generally have been willing to accept this kind of encroachment on their privacy in exchange for convenience. But Clement is concerned that as digital identification becomes more commonplace, the information we provide will be stored in databases and used in ways that we didn’t anticipate – or, worse, aren’t permitted by law. He is researching a way for people to identify themselves digitally that would reveal only the minimum amount of information required, without sacrificing convenience. This principle, called “data minimization,” is fundamental to Canada’s privacy laws, but is not broadly enforced, he says.

He holds up his smartphone and notes that he could display a credential on the screen. Ideally, two things would happen at this point, he says: the person showing the ID would wirelessly transmit only the minimum information that’s required to the organization; and the organization would be able to establish with a high degree of certainty that the credential is authentic.

Clement explains that authentic electronic credentials would be digitally “signed” by the agency that issues them. Someone wishing to create a fake ID would have to decode the agency’s digital signature – a challenge so mathematically complex as to be impossible, he says.

Under this system, organizations would have to make an electronic request for the specific information they need – year of birth, photo, address – and the basis for why they need it before a person’s smartphone or other digital device would send it. The request would be logged on the individual’s device and could be reviewed later to ensure that it complied with privacy legislation, Clement says.

Clement has no plan to set up this new digital ID system himself beyond developing educational prototypes. But he would like to see the idea gain traction in the marketplace. “People almost always provide organizations with the information they ask for because they don’t want to interrupt the transaction,” he says. “Digital credentials could help rebalance this in the public’s favour.”
– Scott Anderson

Education for All

Why do some immigrant groups fare better than others in school?

Canada has an official policy of multiculturalism, but the country’s largest school board might not be meeting the needs of children of newcomers – at least in the case of one significant ethnic group. The dropout rate for first-generation Latin American students and Spanish-speaking youth is 37 per cent, almost double the Toronto average.

That’s cause for concern. Why do children of some immigrant groups fare better than others in the Toronto school system? And how can the system be improved to meet the needs of newcomers from all parts of the world?

Conventional wisdom says cultures that place a low value on education are at least partly to blame for high dropout rates among some student groups. But in interviews with Latin American students, Professor Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez of the Centre for Urban Schooling at OISE found precisely the opposite to be true: Spanish-speaking students are highly aware that getting a good education and mastering the English language are crucial for their future. “The situation that leads them to leave school really has nothing to do with how committed they are to school,” he says.

What administrators should be asking is what conditions are making it difficult for some groups, such as Latin American students, to stay in school. Gaztambide-Fernandez points to three significant issues. First, cutbacks in the 1990s left school boards with less money for ESL instruction. Students are now slotted into one of three ESL levels, meaning that many are placed in a class inappropriate to their skills. In some worst-case scenarios, advanced students are placed in beginner classes because the school doesn’t have the resources to offer more than one level of instruction.

Second, Latin American students report feeling subject to prejudice from teachers and their peers, and believe that the curriculum “ignores” their culture and history. Better teacher education can help, says Gaztambide-Fernandez, but so can asking students to share stories about their own history and culture with their class. This tells students that their culture is valued, and gives them responsibility for shaping their peers’ views, he says.

Finally, many immigrant students work in the evenings to help support their family. They have no choice but to sacrifice academic achievement for economic security. As well, some students might choose an academic path that is less appealing to them if it holds out the promise of being able to obtain a job sooner. The question for schools, says Gaztambide- Fernandez, is how to support students so their choices aren’t dictated solely by their social and economic circumstances.

Ultimately, ensuring that the education system is meeting the needs of new Canadians will ensure a brighter economic future for everyone. “If we want multiculturalism to be a strength of Canadian society, then we have to learn how to take advantage of the differences immigrants bring,” he says.
– Scott Anderson

What Keeps People Honest?

We seem to balance a desire for personal gain against a desire to see ourselves as basically good

The economic human – perfectly rational, perfectly informed and perfectly self-interested – is a useful fiction for studying how economies work. Our behaviour is rational, informed and self-interested enough that economic models based on those assumptions work pretty well.

But not perfectly. People make decisions for all sorts of reasons, including social and emotional ones. Some of the most interesting advances in economics are in a field called behavioural economics, which looks more closely at the psychology of actual humans making actual economic decisions. Inspired by fear, fairness, social pressure, and other not-entirely-rational factors, real people make decisions that economic humans would simply not understand.

Nina Mazar, a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management, is especially interested in dishonesty. Her work examines a seeming paradox – people cheat more than they would if they were strictly moral beings, but not nearly as much as if they were strictly economic ones.

In one study by Mazar, people were offered 50 cents for each arithmetic question they answered correctly. Given the chance to cheat (by reporting their own scores rather than handing in their papers) most goosed their scores by a few points. But almost no one cheated to the maximum level possible, even when they knew they wouldn’t be caught.

Mazar says that people seem to balance their desire for personal gain against their desire to continue to see themselves as basically good. They cheat as much as they can without being forced to revise their self-image as honest people. “You can be a little bit dishonest and benefit a little bit from these temptations, but you don’t have to change your view of yourself,” she says.

But in the same study, if she asked subjects to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember before completing the task, cheating disappeared. The same held true if she asked them to sign an honour code. Mazar says that simply calling people’s attention to their own standards – to their image of themselves as honest – helps reduce cheating.

Mazar has talked to the Canadian Revenue Agency about her research, which could lead to tax forms that are designed to minimize cheating. Eventually, she thinks, businesses might use insights from the work to deter employee and customer theft. But she warns that it’s still not clear how insights from the lab stand up in the real world. “The world outside is much more complex than the lab,” she says.
– Kurt Kleiner

Memory and Aging

Problems with the brain chemical acetylcholine could be partly responsible for cognitive decline

Age-related dementia isn’t just a personal tragedy. As the global population ages, increasing resources will have to go toward caring for people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. The number of sufferers worldwide is expected to surpass 65 million by 2030, and the associated annual cost will exceed $1 trillion.

In the case of Alzheimer’s disease, much attention has been paid to the formation of amyloid plaques and protein tangles in the brain that might interfere with cognitive function. But Eve De Rosa is exploring another possible cause. The psychology professor is investigating the key role that a brain chemical called acetylcholine plays in learning and attention, and how problems with the acetylcholine system might also contribute to cognitive decline.

Acetylcholine levels dwindle during normal aging, and are especially affected in Alzheimer’s patients. Brain receptors that respond to the neurochemical also stop doing their job. One of acetylcholine’s functions is to enhance perceptual attention – our ability to pay attention to important stimuli and tune out distracting ones without having to think about it. For example, we automatically filter out background noise while listening to someone speak.

“It’s been shown in the literature over and over again that elderly people are susceptible to distraction by things that are irrelevant to what they should be doing,” De Rosa says. She thinks the memory loss of dementia might be explained by a failure to filter out irrelevant information, which means important details never make it into memory in the first place. De Rosa has shown that in rats a lack of acetylcholine doesn’t interfere with the ability to access memories that are already established. Instead, it interferes with efficient formation of memories.

In a recent experiment with humans she put young people and older people in a functional MRI machine, and had them look at pictures of overlapping faces and places. She asked them to pay attention only to the faces. In young people, a brain region responsible for responding to faces was active during the task, while a brain region responsible for responding to places was not. But in older people, both regions were active; they couldn’t filter out the irrelevant information. De Rosa says that acetylcholine is unlikely to be the whole story of age-related dementia. But she thinks it’s an important component, and understanding it could lead to effective treatments.
– Kurt Kleiner

Chris Spence, the director of education for the Toronto District School Board, believes in providing parents and students with choices in public education. Under his leadership, alternative schools have flourished.

In a way, it’s surprising that Chris Spence’s professional football career ended with an injury to his Achilles tendon. As director of education for the Toronto District School Board, he needs heels of steel to fend off the arrows that fly his way each day.

Some come from parents, angered about his plan to close schools. Others come from trustees skeptical about his strong ideas on à la carte schooling. And still others from teachers who question the intensity of his old-fashioned idealism, embodied in a bold plan he calls his “Vision of Hope.”

“I believe the world’s changing,” Spence says, with the quiet conviction that’s steadied him throughout his remarkable career. “The only thing that isn’t changing is our schools. We have to keep our eyes on the future so we can best prepare our kids for it.”

Without doubt, Spence’s biggest enemy is numbers. In Toronto, children have been leaving public education in droves: the system is losing almost 4,000 children each year. A declining birthrate, families with kids moving to suburbia, the attraction of private schools and even home-schooling have caused enrolment to fall significantly over the last decade. Then there is the dropout rate. Roughly 25 per cent of students are not graduating from high school, but this figure rises within certain ethnic groups that Spence intends to target for special attention. These groups include aboriginal and Middle Eastern students, as well as students from Central and South America and the Caribbean, whose dropout rates exceed 40 per cent.

Spence thinks he might be able to stem the flight from public schools by giving parents more choice in how their children are educated. He would like to see four new specialized schools open in 2011, adding to the 41 (out of 557 schools in the Toronto board) that already exist. The new schools will concentrate on choir and sports, as well as unisex education. “One size doesn’t fit all,” says Spence. “We’re going to try to provide opportunities so that parents and their children can sit down and say here’s what we want in terms of a learning environment, and where can we get it?”

Many of these choices were available long before Spence came along. French immersion, the granddaddy of boutique schooling, has been around for more than 40 years. But the Toronto of today offers vastly more: there are schools that concentrate on the arts, on math and science, on social justice and the environment. There is a school specifically for gay teenagers, and one for single parents. One school holds kindergarten classes outdoors when possible, and others are unstructured, without tests or homework.

Most controversial, perhaps, are the schools tailored to student ethnicity, such as the east end’s First Nations School, or the much-discussed Africentric Alternative School. For some, such schools revive the ugly spectre of segregation, exactly the sort of menace the U.S. mercifully struck down with Brown vs. the Board of Education in the 1950s. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty when the idea of an Africentric school was first proposed. “I think our shared responsibility is to look for ways to bring people together. One of the most powerful agents of social cohesion is through publicly funded education.”

But total cohesion may be something of a pipe dream, says Spence. “I think we are very much segregated, based on socioeconomics. It’s happening already!” he exclaims. In Toronto, seven out of 10 students belong to visible minority groups – and since the city is carved into ethnic enclaves, certain groups will naturally predominate in a given school. But the teachers and curriculum are not reflecting these changing circumstances, and that’s what Spence aims to correct.

“It’s not segregation, it’s salvation,” he says. (Catchy slogans are often the glue Spence uses to get his messages to stick.) “Getting an opportunity to be in an environment that reflects who they are is salvation for many kids who end up not even dropping out, but being pushed out because they don’t fit the status quo.”

Spence “wouldn’t change a thing” about his own upbringing, but he clearly knows what it’s like to feel alienated in school. Born in England in 1962, he immigrated seven years later with his parents and siblings to Windsor, Ontario. There, as one of very few black students in his school, he was bullied routinely. “I didn’t want to come to school,” he says. “There were guys there who were going to try and take my lunch and make me feel like I didn’t belong.” Still, attentive professional parents (his mother was a nurse, his father an engineer) and good relationships with teachers helped him to prosper.

He has joked that running from bullies helped him develop athletic talents. In the 1980s, he played two seasons as running back for the B.C. Lions before injury propelled him back to school. After earning a degree in criminology, he started working with juvenile offenders. “It was just really demoralizing,” he says of that time. “I thought, I want to get to these kids before they end up here. Because when they do, it’s almost like society’s given up on them. So that was the contribution that I was going to make: I wanted to make sure kids didn’t end up in those circumstances.”

In 1996, he earned a doctorate from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and decided to apply his knowledge as a teacher – then middle-school principal – in one of Toronto’s lower-income neighbourhoods. This last experience informed the second of his four books, entitled On Time! On Task! On a Mission! It diarizes the 1998-1999 school year at Lawrence Heights Middle School, a place where students were given to hurling library books out the window, mooning teachers, defacing property and worse. A place where one student told him, “It doesn’t matter what you guys do. By the time I’m 16 I’m going to end up in jail.”

With a vigorous program of changes, including school uniforms, summer camp and Saturday schooling, Spence was able to instil hope in many of these young adolescents. It’s something he’d been doing for a while. While teaching in 1993, he co-founded a program called Boys2Men, through which at-risk boys are assigned a male mentor who helps tutor them and acts as a role model. The program now boasts more than 70 chapters located in schools across the province.

In fact, strengthening the fragile state of boys’ education has become Spence’s abiding passion. In general, girls now outperform boys on tests of reading and achieve equal results in mathematics and sciences, resulting in a marked gender split by the time students reach university; in Canada, there are currently three women for every two men studying at the post-secondary level. Spence is not alone in his concerns: in the bestselling book Boys Adrift, psychologist and physician Leonard Sax bemoans a culture in which many males now live at home well past boyhood, confused in a world in which traditional notions of masculinity have lost their meaning, and where many boys grow up without fathers.

Experimental all-boys classes have been offered by the school board for years; Spence taught several of them himself. He thinks the time for a publicly funded all-boys school is long overdue. “Anything that we do really has to be driven by the data,” he says, “and when you look at who we suspend or who’s underachieving, it’s boys.” (Records from the Toronto board show that male students receive 77 per cent of all suspensions.)

As a teacher of an all-boys class, Spence’s methods were extremely personal and decidedly old school. “I wouldn’t let the students come into the classroom until I’d shaken their hand,” he says. “I’d say, Ricky, I believe in you. Today’s your day. I really need you to focus in period two. Next guy: John! How was your evening? Hope you have a great day. Let’s do lots of learning today. It took 10 seconds. But it demonstrated that whatever happened to them yesterday, that was yesterday. Today was a new day.”

Research does suggest that boys and girls learn differently, and a casual observation bears this out. On a September morning at Lord Dufferin Public School in Regent Park, I observed a select group of middle-school pupils in unisex classrooms. Both groups were focused and attentive, but the girls were much more static – “I should see some movement here,” admonished their teacher, urging them out of their desks to fetch equipment. They also appeared more consultative, asking each other “what do you think?” when working on a group activity.

In the boys’ math class down the hall, things were different. Small groups working on a problem were more hierarchical in nature, and the boys’ apparent need to move around was not discouraged. One boy stood while figuring out a problem, another lay on the rug and yet another sat hunched over his desk, kicking his heels together.

But both groups were equally well-behaved: it is a myth that boys naturally descend into Lord of the Flies savagery when deprived of the “civilizing” influence of girls. Lord Dufferin principal Gary Crossdale says that in single-sex classes, “the boys are more calm,” since they don’t feel the need to show off. “Teachers can talk directly to the boys about proper interaction with girls,” he says, “and really make it part of the learning. Sometimes we assume kids just learn these things, but we can’t assume anything.”

In spite of the evidence supporting him, Spence has met with opposition from those who do not buy his vision. A 2007 report by the provincial government’s Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat suggested that if anybody benefited from unisex education, it was actually girls, not boys. And certain trustees on the board are firmly entrenched in their opposition. “To say that boys are fundamentally different than girls runs counter to our core philosophy, and is something that will damage all our schools,” says trustee Howard Goodman. He attributes differing success rates for boys and girls to things such as student-teacher interaction and school quality. Goodman also cites a recent northern Ontario study, which showed that simple changes in kindergarten pedagogy could eliminate a long-standing (and in his opinion, highly patronizing) notion: that girls generally enter school with as much as a two-year head start in reading and writing over boys. In the end, “some boys are superior academically, and some girls are dropouts,” he says. “The question is, how do we help all kids who are at the bottom end?”

Spence admits that boys are not a homogeneous group. “I have a son who’s seven years old. Would I put him in an all-boys’ school? Probably not! He’s doing fine in the [public] school that he’s in right now. But there are a whole lot of boys who aren’t, for a whole lot of reasons. So why not try to find, and customize, an environment that’s going to meet their needs?”

One of the hallmarks of emotional intelligence – something Spence has always tried to encourage – is the idea of being comfortable with ambiguity. If ever there was a debate that demanded ambiguity, it’s the one about customized schooling. There are other objections: some have questioned whether the increase in alternative schools will siphon resources from a cash-strapped board, since they are small institutions with separate administrative costs. And even though these schools were designed to provide private-style options to parents who can’t afford $20,000 in yearly tuition, education activists such as Annie Kidder have observed that they still appeal mostly to white, middle-class students.

Further, fixing one aspect of a student’s difficulties might not fix all of them. Tailoring schools to ethnicity, for example, is not in and of itself a perfect solution. The Africentric Alternative School (not a stand-alone school, but one housed within a regular public school building) is now in its second year and thriving, with a waiting list and excellent results on standardized tests. The much-older First Nations School, however, has struggled with poor test results and frequent suspensions.

Like many alternative schools, the First Nations School shares space with another school, and its high suspension rate has been attributed to fighting between the two. Spence thinks “the environment there has to be refreshed somewhat. When you walk into a school, you need to feel that sense of belonging.” Still, the school-within-a-school model seems a necessity for tiny programs offered by a system with large, underpopulated buildings.

These school buildings are relics from a time when children came from bigger families, hailed mostly from Northern Europe and were thought of as identical, empty vessels, without particular needs or learning challenges. Many of these schools are severely undersubscribed now; for those who cherish the idea of schools as places where community bonds are forged, school closings are a regrettable reality. “When a school’s half empty, you have half the resources. And kids don’t get the kind of programming that they want and deserve,” says Spence. So even though alternative schools now represent a small fraction of the board’s total complement, schools-within-schools are almost sure to increase in the future, as the board seeks to fill them with students who would otherwise have sought other educational options.

Yes, it will mean longer commutes for children used to walking. It will mean more separation, in a city that prides itself on being a model of multicultural, and increasingly non-sexist, harmony. But Chris Spence is banking on the idea that when students obtain a strong sense of self early in life, they will be better equipped to take their place in a community as richly varied as Toronto. “More voice and more choice,” he says, ever the sloganeer. “If we can give them those things, we have a better chance of success for all our kids.”

Cynthia Macdonald (BA 1986 St. Michael’s) is a writer in Toronto. She profiled the Munk School of Global Affairs in the Autumn 2010 issue.

One hundred Januaries ago, at the outset of 1911, a young Canadian prepared to become the first person to fly a plane so far out over the uncertain sea that he would lose sight of land. He intended to pilot his biplane from Key West, Florida, 94 miles over the Straits of Florida to Havana. If the flight succeeded, it would also set a new world record for distance travelled over open water.

Douglas McCurdy was a lean, soft-spoken Cape Bretoner who had finished his undergraduate degree in engineering at U of T four years earlier. In 1909, he had become the first in the British Empire to lift a plane into the skies. He was the ninth man ever to fly a mechanized craft after Orville Wright had done it first at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.

After his first few shaky flights, and some crashes, McCurdy had solidified his piloting skills, and between 1909 and 1911 he participated in flying exhibitions all over the continent. Hoping to give the people of Cuba their first glimpse of mechanized flight, The Havana Post and the City of Havana together offered McCurdy the then princely sum of $8,000 (equivalent to more than $100,000 today) to be the first person to fly from Key West to Havana. “Being young and having the spirit of romance and adventure in my soul, to say nothing of the prize involved, I decided to attempt the flight,” he said.

He planned to make it all the way, but, just in case he didn’t, McCurdy paid a tinsmith to make hollow pontoons to attach to the wings. If the plane and pilot survived a sea landing, these flotation devices would buy him some precious time. Caught up in the collective enthusiasm for the nascent field of aviation, the U.S. navy offered to string six torpedo boats along the line of flight, each puffing out smoke to help McCurdy navigate, and prepared to steam to his aid should he crash into the water.

On the island at the southern tip of Florida, huge crowds assembled before dawn on the day of McCurdy’s scheduled departure in mid-January 1911. But a harsh northerly wind was blowing, whipping up the sea, and McCurdy decided to put off the flight. For each of the next six days, the same wind blew and each day the crowds became more restive. Some accused McCurdy of cowardice.

On the seventh day, the wind rested and McCurdy took off. McCurdy had decided to do a brief test flight in Key West to make sure the plane was running well, but, after liftoff, onlookers surged over the landing field. Going back became out of the question; he headed out to sea. “It was a brilliant morning,” he said, “and as I flew over the intense blue water, I felt a thrill of happiness and contentment known only to those who have delighted themselves by this form of travel.” He reached an altitude of 1,000 feet and a speed of 48 miles an hour. “Out on the water, I could see the smoke from the funnels of the nearest torpedo boat. Half a mile out, I saw a beautiful mirage before me over the water. It was magnificent – words fail me to describe it.”

As he passed over each successive torpedo boat, he could hear the sailors blowing their whistles, and then, after two hours, he spied the waterfront of Havana, the foreboding hulk of Morro Castle, the wharves “black with people,” the harbour festive with hundreds of small, brightly coloured sailboats. A cheer went up among the Cubans. “Then I heard a terrific noise behind me,” he recalled, “and one cylinder after another went, until I had no engine.” Within tantalizing sight of his destination, he had no choice but to hazard a water landing. A cry from the crowd as the black speck tumbled into the sea: “My God, he’s fallen!”

The water was thankfully smooth as he set down on the swell, and the pontoons did their job of keeping the plane afloat, but for how long? There were three 14-foot tiger sharks circling below. The U.S.S. Pauling took only four-and-a-half minutes to reach the downed craft. “I didn’t even get wet feet,” McCurdy said, but the plane was a dead loss.

He’d broken two records with his flight – it was the longest and the first out of sight of land – even if it hadn’t ended in triumph. McCurdy had taken the precaution of shipping another plane to Havana, so, without changing clothes, he gave the Cubans a flying exhibition – the first of several over the coming days. “Everywhere McCurdy went he was besieged by a mob . . . and by countless influential citizens begging to bestow some favour on him,” his biographer H. Gordon Green commented.

Eager to bask in the pilot’s glory, the newspaper and City of Havana promised to award McCurdy the prize money – after all, he’d reached Cuban territorial waters even if he hadn’t touched down on terra firma. At a gala ceremony at Havana’s ornate opera house, Cuba’s president José Gómez praised the young man lavishly and handed him an envelope with fancy red and green seals – with no cheque inside. (McCurdy later asked the American minister to Cuba how he could get his money, and the diplomat advised him that there was no easy political or legal way to do so, and to let it go.) “Still, my grandfather remembered this as a happy time,” McCurdy’s grandson Gerald Haddon says from the study of his house in Oakville, Ontario, surrounded with mementoes of his grandfather’s flights. “He set some new records on that Cuban flight – and, of course, he survived.”

McCurdy would become one of the few early barnstormers to outlive his youth – partly due to luck, but also because he was never foolhardy. His relatively conservative attitude toward risk and his insistence on knowing everything about the machines he piloted can be attributed to the influence of his mentor and his family’s longtime Cape Breton neighbour, Alexander Graham Bell.

The probably apocryphal story goes that Bell, while visiting the town of Baddeck in Cape Breton, looked through the window of the local newspaper office and saw the editor – who was McCurdy’s father, Arthur – trying to fix his telephone. Bell reportedly helped by removing a fly from the phone’s mechanism. However the friendship between the men actually started, it developed rapidly. After Bell’s return to Washington, Arthur helped the inventor find land for a stately summer house in Baddeck (next to Bras d’Or Lake) and assisted with the purchase. Arthur also became Bell’s private secretary, and the young Douglas – whose mother had died during the birth of his younger brother – spent much of his time on the Bell estate. Bell and his wife, Mabel – whose own sons had died in infancy – were taken with the boy and offered to adopt Douglas, but a redoubtable McCurdy aunt resisted.

Douglas and his brothers spent much of the summers on the lake, Huck-Finning it on a sailing raft they built. At many other times, Bell encouraged the boy’s interest in science, and later helped pay for his engineering studies at U of T. After graduating, Douglas and his friend Casey Baldwin (BASc 1906) came to Baddeck to assist Bell with his ongoing experiments with flight.

Bell had the young grads work on kites made of pyramidal cells. He wanted to make one that could carry a grown man into the air. In September 1907, after a bitterly cold day of working on the latest model, they sat, sipping hot coffee before Bell’s baronial fireplace, brainstorming. Mabel could see how much her husband, just turned 60, was enjoying the company of the young men and proposed that Bell and his protegés form an association with one goal: “to get into the air.” She had, she said, a nest egg from the sale of property that she was prepared to risk on the fledgling group.

Bell had come across two men with useful skills whom he proposed to add to the group. He persuaded U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt to loan out the leading aeronautical expert of the time, Artillery Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, a Californian with an easy, chivalrous temperament. The other, Glenn Curtiss, had no expertise in flight, but knew everything about small, lightweight engines from owning a motorcycle engine factory in upstate New York. He had no higher education, but was a tinkerer par excellence and had already shown a comfort with risk by breaking the world speed record on a motorbike.

At the Bell Museum’s archives in Baddeck, the inventor’s handwritten scrawls – bad penmanship seems to be the privilege of geniuses – document the progress of these four men. The papers also reveal Bell’s developing opinions of each member of his “brilliant coterie” – Baldwin he called “a thinker,” McCurdy “a doer.”

Bell gave each man the task of designing his own aircraft (to foster competition), but encouraged them all to pitch in with ideas and observations on each other’s experiments and shared with them all his own considered feedback. There seemed to be no jealousy among the quartet – they were too busy, the stakes were too high (an error could mean death or severe injury). Each week, at Bell’s insistence, they produced a newsletter to record their latest victories and setbacks – and the breathless pace of their innovations is documented in these missives.

Because there was more snow – needed to soften landings – in Curtiss’s hometown of Hammondsport, New York, the foursome relocated there in early 1908. They kept in constant touch with Bell, who remained in Baddeck. From kites, the group had moved to gliders, which they’d fly off the steepsided New York hills. With just wings attached to their arms, they lacked stability; they wobbled and often crashed. So they added a stabilizing tail to their gliders, after which 30- and 40-yard flights down the hillsides became common.

Then the men began to integrate lightweight engines into prototypes they’d shown to be airworthy. Selfridge’s plane was ready first, and was named the Red Wing for the scarlet silk (left over from one of Bell’s kites) stretched over its bamboo frame. In what was the first public airplane flight in North America – the Wright flights had been done in secrecy – the Red Wing lifted off (with Baldwin at the helm) from a frozen lake on a windless day, remaining four or five feet high for just over 100 yards. However, on a flight five days later, a gust of wind caught it, tilted it, and its right wing crashed into the ice, shattering it.

Undaunted, the associates came up with a flap at the end of each wing, which could be lifted or dropped to compensate for wind gusts. These balancing devices – which a French aviator named “ailerons” (meaning, “little wings”) – remain in use to this day. They were applied to Baldwin’s plane, the group’s second, the White Wing, which debuted in the spring of 1908. Although the plane proved more maneuverable in the wind, its lifespan was also short. On his maiden flight, McCurdy flew it at a height of 20 feet for almost 200 yards, but crashed it so severely that everyone was surprised he walked away. The plane was beyond repair.

Then, in the summer of 1908, came Curtiss’s plane, the June Bug. When watching it fly on Independence Day, one of Bell’s daughters expressed the sense of wonder common among mechanized flight’s first witnesses: “In spite of all that I had read and heard, and all the photographs I had seen, the actual sight of a man flying through the air was thrilling to a degree I can’t express. We all lost our heads and shouted, and I cried and everybody cheered and clapped.”

Putting his crash behind him, McCurdy got back in the cockpit and in this craft really learned how to fly, using the ailerons to become the first pilot ever to carve a figure eight in the sky.

In the fall, McCurdy returned from Hammondsport to Baddeck with his plane, the Silver Dart, with the idea of showing his friends and neighbours how it could fly – and, with an eye to history, of piloting the first flight in the British Empire. He took off in February of 1909 from the frozen surface of Bras d’Or Lake, and remained aloft for three-quarters of a mile, flying at about 40 miles an hour. He wanted to go right back up, but the always cautious Bell prevented him. “You can fly her again tomorrow if you like, but that’s all for today.” The British aviation authorities recognized McCurdy’s achievement by ultimately awarding him the first pilot’s licence in the Empire.

With this, all four men had completed the task Mabel Bell had set for them (and funded) – “to get into the air.” But the triumph was tinged with sadness. A few months earlier, the U.S. government had asked Selfridge to be an observer on a test flight piloted by Orville Wright near Washington. While the plane was up in the air, there was a crack like a pistol shot, a piece of the propeller blade fell off and the craft plummeted to earth. Wright survived, but his passenger Selfridge died. Mrs. Bell wrote the remaining three: “I can’t get over Tom’s being taken. He was so quiet, it seems strange how large the place is he has left vacant…. I am so sorry for you in this breaking of your beautiful association.” It meant the end of their group, and the close of a period of extraordinary invention and camaraderie.

After the breakup, the U of T chums Baldwin and McCurdy decided they would put their hard-earned aeronautical knowledge to use and set up an airplane factory in Baddeck. With Bell’s help, they sought to convince the Canadian government that planes could assist in national defence. A demonstration flight of the Silver Dart was scheduled at Camp Petawawa in Ontario in August of 1909. As cadets, officers and defence department officials watched, McCurdy made the plane float, turn and bob through the air satisfactorily, at 50 miles an hour and 50 feet above the earth. But when he brought the plane down, the wheels dug into the sandy runway and the plane tumbled over on its nose, splintering into pieces. No government orders for planes would be forthcoming.

Baldwin chose to help Bell on his experiments with hydrofoils, while McCurdy decided to join Curtiss on the then nascent barnstorming circuit – doing exhibition flights for money across the U.S. The young pilots on this circuit were the idols of their generation. Humans had always dreamed of soaring like the birds and now, as a result of careful science and engineering and devil-may-care bravery by the first test pilots, the impossible had become possible.

McCurdy joined what they called the “aeronautical circus,” and did shows (for $500 each) in almost every major city east of the Mississippi – in D.C., he circled the Washington Monument; in Brooklyn and Palm Beach, he became the first pilot to transmit and receive wireless signals on board; in Ontario, he won a race from Hamilton to Toronto against another member of the flying fraternity by cutting over the lake. Accidents, many fatal, abounded on the circuit and McCurdy had his share of close calls. In Chicago, his plane caught fire after coming into contact with live wires. In Allentown, Pennsylvania, his motor stopped 800 feet in the air, and wind capsized the plane, before he righted it and glided to a violent landing. McCurdy continued to believe the plane would play a role in future wars, and in exhibitions he would drop oranges, which he called bombs, on targets identified as battleships to prove his point. Some Japanese observers at a U.S. airshow took note, and wasted no time placing orders for planes on behalf of their military.

Even the onset of the First World War didn’t change the mind of the Canadian government, though, with Sam Hughes, the minister of militia and defence, blustering at McCurdy: “The aeroplane is an invention of the devil and will never play any part in such a serious business as the defence of the nation.” “I am sure,” the young man said quietly, “you will live to regret those words, General Hughes.”

During the First World War, McCurdy and Curtiss helped supply aircraft to the British, and McCurdy ran a flight-training school in Toronto, sending trainees to join the newborn British air force. (It was only in the 1920s that Canada belatedly inaugurated its own flying force.) Soon after the war, McCurdy met and married a Woodstock, Ontario, beauty, Margaret Ball – with whom he’d have a boy and a girl.

Throughout his life, McCurdy would continue to contribute to the growth of aeronautics in Canada – albeit in less dramatic ways than he did in his youth. In the 1920s and ’30s, he was president of the Curtiss-Reid aircraft company, which sold civilian aircraft around the world. In the Second World War, he oversaw Canadian aircraft production. From 1947 to 1952, McCurdy served as Nova Scotia’s lieutenant-governor and there are photos in his province’s archives of the still lean, distinguished-looking man squiring the impossibly young-looking Crown Princess Elizabeth about Halifax.

McCurdy never retired from flying, becoming, before his death in 1961 at age 74, the oldest licensed pilot in the world. In his later years, he sometimes spoke about his early flights – “he wouldn’t talk much about them, unless you asked,” Haddon says. When people did press him, the Cuban flight generally took pride of place among his recollections. In speeches and radio broadcasts, he tended to spend the longest time describing it, lingering fondly over the enthusiasm and duplicity of his hosts, remembering that stunning mirage over the water. Among the many firsts, the inventions and innovations he helped in, the successful takeoffs and flights, the crashes he’d somehow survived, there was this: McCurdy was the first man to have such confidence in himself and his plane to head so far out over the open sea that he lost sight of land.

Alec Scott (LLB 1994) splits his time between Toronto and San Francisco. He writes frequently about arts, travel and the law.

There may be no one who better understands how Douglas McCurdy felt during his first flight a century ago than Todd Reichert, who is an engineering PhD student at U of T.

Last August, in Tottenham, Ontario, Reichert became the first person to fulfil the vision Leonardo DaVinci set down in his notebooks in 1485 – of flying a human-powered vehicle through the air like a bird. “This is the original aeronautical dream,” Reichert says. “Humans have always wanted to fly like birds.”

On a quiet summer morning, Reichert pedalled hard to get his 43-kilogram craft’s immense wings flapping; at 32 metres from tip to tip, the Snowbird’s wingspan equals that of a Boeing 737. Aloft for 20 seconds, the “ornithopter” covered a distance of 145 metres at an average speed of 26 kilometres an hour.

Like McCurdy before him, Reichert had a core group of four behind him: U of T professor emeritus James DeLaurier, playing the role of Alexander Bell; Cameron Robertson (MASc 2009), the chief structural engineer; and two aviation enthusiasts from Vancouver, high school student Robert Dueck and his father, Carson. They call themselves the “five amigos.”

Another 30 U of T students helped during the four years of designing and building the craft. The key engineering problem: the wings had to shift their angle of attack between the upstroke and downstroke, thereby providing sufficient lift and forward propulsion.

Like his predecessor McCurdy, Reichert had his share of bad landings along the way: “I never flew higher than I was willing to fall. I did get a scratch once, but mainly when I was coming in for a crash, I was thinking, ‘Oh crap, we have to repair this thing.’”

Although Dr. Dan’s early challenges, outsized success and generosity are unusual, in some respects his story is not. Alumni tell us time and again how important their U of T education was to their subsequent endeavours. And for many, a scholarship or bursary opened doors that might otherwise have been closed.

Devon Ethier, for example, received a National Scholarship covering his tuition for all four years at U of T. Now a fourth year commerce student, Devon says the award, in addition to providing much-needed financial assistance, enabled him to leave his home province of British Columbia, broadening his life experience. The scholarship also led indirectly to a three-week placement earlier this year in a village in Mali, working with Hands Across the Nations, a small Toronto development agency. He is now thinking about how his business education might be applied longer-term in the development arena.

Scholarships and needs-based awards give countless University of Toronto students like Devon the opportunity to receive a first-rate education while at the same time developing important life and leadership skills. That’s why, over the past 20 years, the value of bursaries and scholarships U of T offers annually has grown from $8 million to $143 million. Bursaries and scholarships now account for about 10 per cent of the university’s operating expenses, up from four per cent in 1996.

As per-student provincial grants have dropped in recent years, the university has had to rely more on tuition revenues. To ensure that U of T remains open to the best students, regardless of their economic circumstances, in 1998 the Governing Council affirmed that “no student offered admission to a program at U of T should be unable to enter or complete the program due to lack of financial means.”

I’m proud that U of T made this commitment and has followed through on it. Compared to its Ontario peers, U of T has relatively more students from lower-income households. And more than 2,000 students in the Faculty of Arts and Science who receive OSAP effectively pay zero tuition because of the financial support they receive from the university, while 8,000 students pay $4,000 or less. Our commitment applies to graduate students as well as undergrads. The majority of students in our doctoral-stream programs receive funding packages for up to five years of study. As Canada’s pre-eminent graduate university, we have also created a program of competitive doctoral completion grants for students requiring additional support to finish their programs beyond the usual timeframe. In 2008-09, graduate students received $195 million in funding.

Based on the exceptional growth in student aid over the past two decades, one might think that additional support is not required. That’s simply not the case. Enrolment has soared in that time – by about 40 per cent. More high-achieving students than ever are applying to U of T, and our peers, nationally and internationally, are offering them ever-larger scholarships. Costs of education and living expenses have increased. And in a changing educational context, we need to offer our students a broader and better learning experience. For example, some of our peer institutions send substantially more undergraduates overseas for a term abroad. Supporting students in this way helps to equip them for success in a world that grows ever more interconnected.

Time and again, we have seen accomplished alumni not only mentor their successors at the university, but give back to their alma mater by funding awards for today’s and tomorrow’s students. It’s a virtuous cycle that has had a huge impact on the institution, and is a very wise investment in Canada’s next generation of leaders. For that, among other things, I send my thanks and warmest wishes to the University of Toronto’s remarkable alumni.

Sincerely,
David Naylor

Rosa Sarabia
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese University of Toronto

Questioning How We Eat
I was thrilled to see the issue of factory farming addressed in U of T Magazine. Finally, people are beginning to openly question the way we eat. Quite simply, there is no ethical way to eat animals or animal products. No matter how humanely the animal is raised, suffering is involved in transport and slaughter. The meat and dairy industries would like to keep us ignorant of how they mistreat animals. This is why we are not welcome on their farms or in slaughterhouses. Sadly, I feel most humans are too selfish and unwilling to change to give up meat, even if eating it means that the animals are exploited and mistreated. But, as an old Chinese proverb says, “To close one’s eyes will not lessen another’s pain.”

Susan Larson
MEd 1983 OISE
Toronto

No Easy Solution
I found Stacey Gibson’s well-written and well-researched article on factory farming both revealing and disturbing. Now I understand what cruel places factory farms can be – and that the slice of beef or pork on my plate probably came from an animal that was raised under conditions of the most unimaginable horror. The question of cruelty to animals defies easy solution. People are not going to stop eating meat tomorrow. Nor are the owners of factory farms going to stop looking out for the bottom line. However, we all do have the power to modify our eating habits and thus help to bring about the little bit of change that will force a curb on the worst excesses.

John Best
MA 1968
Ottawa

Farmers Are Not the Culprits
Stacey Gibson’s article about industrial agriculture, “This Looks Like a Farm,” cites the farrowing crate as an example of the cruelty that sows experience on an industrial farm. The purpose of the crate is to protect the piglets. Sows will sometimes crush piglets by accidentally lying on them. The crate prevents unnecessary loss of life. More generally, the article seems to suggest that the farmer is the culprit in this “violent” system. Yet the consumer is the driving force. The consumer wants meat at a low cost. Many farmers have gone out of business as a result of the high cost of machinery, working the land and the hundreds of restrictions, laws and inspections that affect their business. Is the consumer willing to pay for the vet to castrate the piglets under anaesthesia? Is the consumer willing to eat meat that has been subject to anaesthesia?

Glen Eagle
BA 1976 VIC, MDiv 1979
Churchill, Ontario

False Hope?
I found your article “A Month in Medicine” about mentorships for high school students very interesting. The idea behind the program, as I understand it, is to encourage African- Canadian and aboriginal students to consider a career in health because they are under-represented in the field. Yet every year, thousands of bright, young medical-school applicants dream of careers as doctors, but are declined because of a lack of available space in medical schools. The problem is not a lack of interest; it’s a lack of funding for medical schools. The unfortunate downside of this mentorship might be that it gives young people hope of gaining entry into a program that will ultimately be denied to them. Perhaps more attention should be given to increasing class sizes rather than generating greater interest in the medical profession.

Maria Orjuela
BASc 2007
Richmond Hill, Ontario

Hot and Cold
What struck me as odd about “Can Our Forests Stand the Heat?” by Kurt Kleiner is that I don’t recall the heat last May as much as I do the snow. I remember a weekend in late May at our family cottage in Highlands East, Ontario, when big, wet snowflakes began to fall. The snow covered the ground and the newly formed leaves, creating a scene that looked more like Christmas than spring. Two weeks later, the leaves began to fall. It would have looked like autumn, except the leaves on the ground were all green. Since then the foliage, especially on the maples, has appeared thin, with the brown tinge that Prof. Sean Thomas spoke of. Even with plenty of rain and sunshine this summer, the trees never seemed to recover from that shock. This fall, instead of turning bright colours, the leaves appear to be simply “rusting” off of the trees. I wonder if that spring snowfall had any bearing on the condition of the trees.

Chris Keir
Toronto

Culture and the Law
As an associate professor who has taught education law at OISE for about 30 years, a U of T alumnus and a family court judge in Toronto, I was fascinated by Alec Scott’s piece on Shelley Saywell. I believe Ontario judges should have the opportunity to see her film In the Name of the Family. I am finding more and more cases involving unfamiliar cultural traditions reaching our courtroom, and, ultimately, we will have to take these customs into account. Culture is highly relevant for legal decision-making; it is often referred to as the theory of enculturation.

Marvin Zuker
BA 1963 UC, MEd 1973
Toronto

The Downside of 360
As a recording engineer and artist, I’ve personally seen that 360 deals, as mentioned in the article about Erika Savage, are terrible for the artist. Artists do not see income from record sales unless they recoup advances. In their early years, artists earn less from album sales than from concerts. With a 360 deal, an artist gives up a greater share of concert revenue. This is how record companies are adapting? I’d call it a desperate attempt to generate greater profit. If the record companies had really been interested in adapting, they would have expanded into digital music 15 years earlier. Instead, they had the Recording Industry Association of America issue subpoenas to citizens for downloading pirated music. I hope Savage will ensure that record labels help truly develop artists by giving them time to establish a brand. This will help them build a loyal fan base and a long career – to the benefit of both artist and label.

Omar Kamran
BSc 2008
Toronto

Broadly Appealing
In past years, I’ve found U of T Magazine to be inward-looking, highlighting on-campus activities and personalities. They were rarely relevant to most of your readers’ everyday lives. However, recent issues have been outstanding. I enjoyed the broad appeal of “Parents – at Last!” (Summer 2010) and “A Year in Mumbai” (Autumn 2010). I find the Leading Edge section stimulating, and I admire the punch of the articles and sidebars. The layout and images are visually attractive. It has the look and feel of a first-class magazine.

Mary Howden
BA 1963 Trinity
Barrie, Ontario

Green Folly
Does David Beattie really believe that if all the participants in U of T’s Alumni Travel Program were to boycott air travel it would alter the world’s environment one iota (Letters, Autumn 2010)? It certainly would not! Beattie reveals a political agenda when he claims that such trips are for “the privileged.” He seems to belong to the movement that more and more often is being referred to as green fascism.

George Varcoe
BMus 1955
Österskär, Sweden

Professor James Graham’s office is noticeably barren: There’s no artwork on the walls, and only a handful of texts on his bookshelves. That, of course, will change; he’s only been at U of T since September, when he arrived to serve as the first director of the recently established Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics.

While his office may be sparse and eerily quiet, the institute itself is a beehive of activity. It is already allied with two facilities pursuing first-rate astronomical research on campus: the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. “CITA is already world-renowned for theoretical astrophysics,” says Graham, who was previously chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. “The goal is to match its extraordinary impact, but focusing on the experimental instrumentation aspects of astrophysics.” That, of course, means telescopes – Graham is an ardent supporter of the planned Thirty Meter Telescope, set to be the world’s largest – as well as the sophisticated devices needed to turn the dim light of unfathomably distant objects into useful scientific data.

Graham is renowned for his work in “adaptive optics,” which allows telescopes to correct for the blurring caused by the Earth’s atmosphere, and for his work in developing instrumentation for infrared astronomy. But he is also a hands-on observer: In 2008, Graham was part of the team that discovered Fomalhaut b, the first exoplanet – a planet orbiting a star beyond our solar system – to be directly imaged in visible light.

But seeing these distant worlds is just the beginning. Graham would like to understand how planetary systems form – a question that has been hotly debated but never solved. “It’s really the simplest question that you can ask about the origin and evolution of planets,” he says. There are at least two competing theories – core accretion and gravitational stability – but which one is correct? The Dunlap Institute, says Graham, is poised to build the telescopes and the detectors that will answer that question. “We have the capability within our grasp of seeing these planetary systems directly, and seeing which of these theories is valid.”

This is also an example of how, for Graham, there is really no way of separating theoretical work from experiment and observation; in fact, they go hand-in-hand. Theory can make predictions, but it also serves as “a springboard to focus your experimental activity,” he says. “[It tells you] what experiments need to be done, what technologies need to be developed to explore these predictions.”

For Graham, the rest of the universe is equally fascinating – and what he’s learning about planets will likely pay off further afield. “The wonderful thing about astrophysics is that it’s intertwined and interlocked,” he says. “Understanding how planets form is very closely related to the problem of star formation; the problem of star formation is very closely related to how clouds of dust and gas in the Milky Way form and disperse. And I don’t think you can be curious about one of those questions without being curious about the others.”

Allan Wax
BSc 1976 Innis
Los Angeles

Trapped!

I attended St. Michael’s College in the early 1970s and lived at Loretto College Women’s Residence. In the basement was a seldom-used lounge with a TV, a few tables and chairs, and some sofas. The summer before, long sofas had been replaced by short ones to discourage the activity that had given the room the nickname “The Passion Pit.” (The change seemed only to make the couples using it more inventive and flexible.) At 11 p.m., the seminarian who guarded the residence’s entryway made sure the “pit” was empty and locked the door. One night my boyfriend and I had been watching TV there. We both fell asleep – and continued sleeping as the seminarian looked cursorily into the room and shut us in. As far as I know, I am the only woman ever to have been locked in the Passion Pit overnight with my boyfriend in a women’s residence run by Catholic nuns.

Sheilah O’Connor
BA 1976 St. Michael’s
Toronto

Rite of Passage
In the early 1970s, my roommate and I chose to live in a lovely second-floor room in the old ivy-covered Christie mansion that was part of St. Joseph’s College. The room looked out over Queen’s Park, and its two windows opened onto the flat roof of the carport, which made for great, if clandestine, sunbathing. (The nuns would not have approved!) We knew the room had been an old bathroom. The mattress of my bed rested on a loose piece of plywood covering the old bathtub. When too many of us perched on the edge of the bed, we tumbled onto the floor with mattress, bedding and plywood flipping over onto us. What we didn’t know until a few weeks into the year was that our closet had a door that led to the next room. Few residents knew this. Even the don didn’t know, which would be lucky for us. We were doing some serious studying one autumn night when we heard noises outside our window. Opening the drapes, we beheld a young male figure climbing up the ivy vines onto the carport roof. He made his way to the window, held up a bottle of wine and whispered urgently, “Let me in!” Happy to have a nocturnal visitor (since male visitors weren’t permitted in girls’ rooms in the evenings), we got to feeling very pleasant after a couple of glasses of wine. We must have also gotten rather loud. There was a sudden knock at the door and the don’s voice said, “Open up, I know you have a man in there!” We quickly shoved our visitor into the closet and through to surprised friends in the next room. All innocence, we opened our door to the don, who grew increasingly perturbed as she inspected the room and found no man – not even in the closet!

Mary Betz
BSc 1974 St. Michael’s
Auckland, New Zealand

Roommates Hiba (left) and Richa (right)

Meet Codomesticus noxius, known by its more common name of the “Bad Roommate.” A parasitic species, C. noxius invades its host by such transmission vectors as bulletin-board notices, friends of friends and Craigslist. Once infection has occurred, C. noxius quickly metastasizes in the host’s environment, resulting in outbreaks of dirty dishes, loud music, curious smells, bounced cheques and passive-aggressive Post-it notes. Irritation, insomnia and teeth-grinding are common symptoms. The species particularly thrives on and around university campuses. There are treatments, but there is no known cure.

Luckily, U of T is leading the way in the fight against this terrible disease. This summer, the University of Toronto Student Housing Service introduced its new Roommate Finder, an online matchmaking service that allows students to find the right person with whom to share an apartment.

“We’re ecstatic about the results that we’ve had,” says Jennifer Bennett, manager of the housing service. There are currently about 775 user profiles on Roommate Finder. Students fill out a survey about living habits such as sleep schedules and cleaning routines (“I don’t like to clean, so let’s just say whoever gets the urge,” reads one option under the “household cleaning” preferences). Desired price range and location are also noted. Students choose from a range of avatars – a snowboarder, a bookworm, even a toga-partier – to give their profile a shot of personality. Once they have filled out their own profile, they can browse others to find matches. Users can contact each other through a simple, Facebooklike interface to make the introduction, without disclosing personal info. “We wanted to create something that was secure and safe for students, and we wanted to think about their privacy,” says Bennett.

So you’re a heavy metal–blasting vegetarian teetotaler seeking the same? There’s probably someone on Roommate Finder you could live with in perfect harmony off-campus. (On-campus residences and colleges still handle their own matching.)

One of those students is Hiba Ali, in her second year of a master’s degree in forest conservation and environmental studies. Since she spent the summer in Ottawa, it was difficult to co-ordinate a long-distance roommate search and scout for apartments; Roommate Finder solved both problems. The service also allowed her to find certain qualities, beyond simply someone to split the rent. “I don’t drink alcohol, so I prefer to be with someone who doesn’t bring a lot of alcohol around,” she says. “And I prefer to keep a halal/kosher home. My roommate Richa is vegetarian, so that worked out really well. We’re even friends now.”

Score one for modern technology in the battle against Bad Roommates.

“The Snitch is loose! Brooms up!” So yelled second-year student Patrick Treacy (centre, in red), as opposing teams rushed at each other on the Trinity College backfield recently in a game that’s sweeping university campuses: Quidditch.

Quidditch is a wizard’s sport, and Harry Potter its most famous player. But Muggles have gotten into the game, and altered it to accommodate their inability to fly. In a regulation match, seven players on each team try to outscore their opponents by throwing a ball through one of three hoops. At the same time, team members called “seekers” try to capture the Golden Snitch, a tennis ball held by a speedy runner who can go anywhere, even off the field. The game is over when the Snitch is caught. Players must keep a broom between their legs at all times; no mops or other substitutes allowed.

U of T’s 18-member squad – they call themselves the Nifflers in honour of the magical creature from the J.K. Rowling books who sniffs out gold – practises outside Trinity College. This fall, the team was preparing for the world championships, which was expected to draw more than 50 teams to New York in November. Treacy, fresh from a recent win against Ryerson, is confident about U of T’s chances. “We’ve started planning our strategy. I think we will do quite well.”

The resulting prose is gibberish, but the grammar and punctuation are for the most part accurate: quotation marks and parentheses come in pairs, and subjects and verbs agree. (For example, “Akkerma’s Alcesia Minor (including) of Hawaiian State Rites of Cassio. Other parish schools were established in 1825, but were relieved on March 3, 1850.”)

The passages, like all of the network’s output, are based on prediction – the goal of the research is simply to anticipate the next character in a sequence. “It spits out one letter at a time, which happen to form words,” says Sutskever, 24, who earned a BSc in 2005 and an MSc in 2007 from U of T. “It discovered that words exist, and it discovered grammar.” It also exceeded all expectations.

Just as there are neurons in the human brain that communicate, Sutskever’s network contains 2,000 digital counterparts whose behaviour is guided by a learning algorithm. This algorithm will look for places where the network has made a mistake, and change the connection to decrease chances for error. “If you do this long enough,” Sutskever says, “you reach a stage where it will make fewer mistakes.”

Sutskever will be refining his neural network in the near future, and he will have some extra help along the way. In June, he became the first Canadian to receive a prestigious Google PhD fellowship (introduced in 2009 to facilitate information-related academic research), which will provide him with $50,000 over the next two years.

While neural networks are increasingly common – they are found in speech-recognition software and some search engines – Sutskever is reluctant to discuss potential applications for his work. The next step is to train the network on New York Times articles, with the goal of teaching it to identify authorship. Sutskever concedes this could likely form the basis for plagiarism software one day, provided it functions well enough.

For now, though, Sutskever wants to remain open to possibility. “If you know your destination, you will probably get there,” he says, “but if you don’t, there is more of a chance of stumbling upon something really interesting.”

A longtime director of the Career Centre, Frankle (BA 1968 UC) switched to alumni affairs in 1988. As assistant vice-president of alumni and development, she played a significant role in the university’s Great Minds campaign, which raised $1.1 billion – an amount that remains unrivalled in Canadian fundraising history. But Frankle didn’t consider herself primarily a fundraiser; her job, she says, was creating relationships. “One of the things I set out to do was to make contact personal for alumni and friends of the university,” says Frankle. “I did that by putting my name on everything, so that everyone knew there was someone here they could get in touch with.”

In the words of President David Naylor, Frankle “made a career out of recognizing and thanking others for their contributions.” This was best exemplified through her creation of the Arbor Awards in 1989, a celebration of alumni volunteers. An enthusiastic volunteer herself, Frankle chaired U of T’s United Way campaign for almost 30 years, supervised U of T Day (the university’s annual open house) throughout the 1990s and supported initiatives related to Pride Toronto and Black History Month.

Frankle also forged links with alumni who might otherwise have felt far from U of T, geographically or otherwise. She opened the Hong Kong office in 1993, which established the university as a pioneer in international advancement. And, in 2007, she brainstormed the perfect event to commemorate Convocation Hall’s 100th anniversary: a special ceremony for 33 veterans who, for reasons of military service, hadn’t been able to receive their degrees during the Second World War. “It was the most amazing ceremony ever,” she recalls. “We were all in tears.”

With creativity and consummate people skills, Frankle made alumni feel consistently valued. “People love her – pure and simple,” says Jon Dellandrea, who worked with her for 11 years in his capacity as U of T vice-president and chief advancement officer. His successor David Palmer echoed that sentiment in a recent message to his staff. “There are very few who can say they have served an institution so faithfully for so long,” he wrote, “and made so many friends.”