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20th Anniversary Memorial for the Montreal Massacre
This year is the 20th anniversary of the tragic murder of 14 female engineering students at L’Ecole Polytechnique. Each year Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter hosts a day long public conference to discuss the topic of violence against women. This year they invite women from traditionally male dominated fields to discuss their experiences. 20 years after Montral Massacre what has changed for women? The event is free, open to the public and is on December 5th at the Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library.
For more detials click here.
SCWIST Newsletter - July 2009
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Removing ovaries in hysterectomy can boost risk of lung cancer
Researchers surprised by findings about one of the more common surgeries
By Sharon Kirkey – Vancouver Sun – July 22, 2009
Surgically removing a woman’s ovaries during a hysterectomy may nearly double her risk of developing lung cancer, according to a new Canadian study that surprised even the researchers.
The finding may help explain why only about 15 per cent of smokers eventually develop lung cancer, and it suggests hormones might play an important role in the leading cancer killer of women in Canada.
Hysterectomy—removal of the uterus—is the second most frequently performed surgical procedure for Canadian women after cesarean sections. More than 36,000 women had a hysterectomy in 2007-08, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, and about 30 per cent had both ovaries removed as well.
About 90 per cent of hysterectomies are done for benign or non-cancerous problems such as irregular menstruation and fibroids.
“We found that women who experienced non-natural menopause are at almost twice the risk of developing lung cancer compared to women who experienced natural menopause,” Anita Koushik, a researcher at the University of Montreal’s Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, said in announcing her team’s findings Tuesday.
“This increased risk of lung cancer was particularly observed among women who had non-natural menopause by having had both their ovaries surgically removed.”
It’s the second study this year to associate removal of both ovaries with higher odds of developing lung cancer. A study published in April involving more than 29,000 women participating in the U.S. Nurses’ Health Study found that removal increased the risk of lung cancer, as well as fatal and non-fatal coronary heart disease—compared to women whose ovaries were intact.
Researchers are at a loss to explain the findings.
“Many things, if not most things in medicine are found by serendipity,” said Dr. William Parker, lead author of the American study and a faculty member at the John Wayne Cancer Institute at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif.
“The smart people go, OK, we don’t understand it, but let’s try to figure it out. It may be true, it may not be true,” Parker said. “But now that you’ve got two papers within a six-month period saying the same thing, you have to pay attention to it.”
Doctors have long recommended removal of the ovaries at the time of hysterectomy to reduce the risk of ovarian cancer.
“People thought, you go through menopause, your ovaries stop working, you don’t need them and you could get ovarian cancer,” Parker said.
But ovaries make hormones after menopause that are converted in the body to estrogens. “There’s mounting evidence those hormones protect your heart to some degree,” and possibly the lungs, he said.
“Ovarian cancer is a terrible disease,” he said. “But heart disease and lung cancer are the major killers of women.”
His team’s study found that removing both ovaries decreased the risk of ovarian and breast cancer, but at no age was it associated with increased survival.
For women not at high risk for ovarian cancer, “There is no question the ovaries should stay in,” Parker said.
The Canadian study, published this week in the International Journal of Cancer, involved 422 women with lung cancer and 577 without at 18 Montreal-area hospitals that together diagnose 98 per cent of all lung cancers that occur in the greater Montreal area. The team looked at income, age, gender, occupational risk factors, medical and smoking history, menstruation and pregnancy histories.
Biodiversity and the Mountain Pine Beetle
The Forest Investment Account Forest Sciences Program (FIA-FSP) has results
By Carolyn Whittaker, MSc.
Consultant.
We know that the mountain pine beetle (MPB) has had a dramatic impact on forests in British Columbia, but we know little about how MPB-related forest management affects biodiversity. Since 2004/05, British Columbia’s provincial forestry research program, the Forest Investment Account-Forest Science Program (FIA-FSP), has funded thirty-four
projects focused on the biodiversity implications of the MPB outbreak; many of these projects have been jointly funded by FIA-FSP and the Canadian Forest Service Mountain Pine Beetle Research Initiative.
Within the sustainability subprogram, research on the conservation of biodiversity in relation to the MPB outbreak has been of particular interest in recent years. The topic has also been a focus with respect to extension by the provincial forestry extension provider, FORREX. A recent FORREX workshop in Prince George, “Mountain Pine Beetle: From lessons learned to community based solutions,” highlighted much of the current knowledge on MPB management and biodiversity. The proceedings have been published in the Winter 2009 issue of the Journal of Ecosystem Management 9(3) (http://www.forrex.org/JEM/jem.asp).
For this article we have chosen to highlight several areas where FIA-FSP researchers are on the leading edge of new science: the role of wildlife tree patches and stand structure in conserving biodiversity (Rachel Botting and Craig Delong, BC Ministry of Forests and Range); the utility of timber cruise statistics to inform stand-level biodiversity assessments (John Innes and Alyson McHugh, University of British Columbia); and predicting biodiversity after MPB management (Kathy Martin, University of British Columbia).
Clearly, biodiversity is enhanced by creating and maintaining structure in managed stands, but what is the role of stand structure in large mountain pine beetle cutblocks? Botting and DeLong focused on species of lichens, liverworts, and mosses that are particularly sensitive to edge effects in order to better understand the role that wildlife tree patches play in maintaining biodiversity. They found that if the patch had been isolated from the surrounding mature forest for more than 6 years, in the smaller patches particular species of mosses and liverworts declined. Botting and Delong found a significant loss of species richness in patches of less than 1 ha compared to patches larger than 5 ha. According to Delong, “the study shows that microclimate is not maintained in smaller patches; so we need to retain a larger proportion of large patches.” Their research also found a decline in species richness with increasing amounts of dead lodgepole pine in the patches. DeLong suggests that managers doing salvage logging for MPB “leave larger wildlife tree patches
containing at most 33% lodgepole pine if they want to maintain species richness.”
DeLong states that “we should be looking at longer term studies, at least six years but ideally ten years, if we want to actually see the effects of management on species decline.” Botting and Delong are currently developing two papers: one on the relationship between species diversity and log characteristics and one on the relationship between species
richness and patch characteristics; they hope to publish these papers in Forest Ecology and Management.
One challenge with understanding the role wildlife tree patches play in maintaining biodiversity is the lack of baseline data. Under the Forest and Range Evaluation Program
(FREP), Innes and McHugh explored the potential for using timber cruise data as a baseline to inform stand-level biodiversity in MPB forests. Their study in the Arrow Boundary Forest District (all blocks >40 ha and retention areas >2 ha) completed surveys before and after harvesting and looked at biodiversity characteristics such as snags and coarse woody debris. Their main finding was that a lot of information is available in B.C., particularly in the timber cruise data sets, that could be used for biodiversity assessments. McHugh states, “We just need to collate these data into accessible useable databases and fill in gaps such as coarse woody debris.” Innes and McHugh’s study highlights the
opportunity to augment existing data sources to tackle such questions as the interactions and cumulative effects of disturbances such as epidemic, salvage, grazing, and invasive
species. Innes and McHugh plan to publish their results in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment.
Wildlife population dynamics is another critical concern related to changes in the landscape caused by large-scale harvesting of MPB forests. Martin has evaluated the role of insect and beetle management activities on wildlife at peak and post-epidemic conditions in mature mixed-conifer forests. Martin found that overall and within many guilds, there has been a boom and bust response to the MPB outbreak in forest bird and squirrel populations: first an increase during the pre-outbreak and peak, then a rapid decline during the post-epidemic phase. In particular, chickadees and nuthatches declined earliest and crashed to levels lower than pre-outbreak, whereas woodpeckers remained high longer than other guilds. Wildlife population dynamics are significant because at least 26 species of forest vertebrates eat or kill beetles, which may have delayed the increase in MPB somewhat; however, ultimately the extent of the outbreak resulted in a large and strong pulse of extra food in the forest, particularly food for winter and early spring conditions.
Martin suggests that a mix of forest management silvicultural activities (hazard reduction, cutting, retention of a range of patches of mature trees with aspen trees) is likely to mitigate the peak of the MPB outbreak by staggering the timing and perhaps the amplitude of the peak. Thus, given the habitat changes caused by MPB and other forest insects (fir budworm, spruce beetle) and beetle management activities (especially salvage logging), Martin suggests that we need to think about what habitats remain for forest wildlife in the post-epidemic forest stand conditions.
Martin’s work has recently been published in several peer-reviewed journals. For a more detailed overview of her research, see the following paper in the FORREX Mountain Pine Beetle workshop summary document: Martin, K., M. Drever, and A.R. Norris. 2008. Biodiversity maintenance and conservation in post-epidemic MPB forests in interior British Columbia. http://www.forrex.org/program/con_bio/PDF/Workshops/Pine_Beetle_Workshop/Martin_Biodiversity.pdf.
FIA-FSP supports and funds initiatives and activities that address the critical knowledge required to enable sciencebased sustainable management of BC’s forest resources. A 14-member Forest Science Board (FSB) guides the funding program along with several advisory committees comprised of operational foresters and scientists from industry, government, universities, and First Nations, as well as extension professionals. Three program advisory committees (PACs) support the FSB in shaping the FIA-FSP by providing
strategic advice and recommending funding priorities for the different programs. The PACs are the Sustainability PAC (SPAC), the Forest Growth and Value PAC (FPAC), and the Extension PAC (EPAC). Research on MPB has been a top priority since 2005 with a total of 99 projects funded from 2004/05 to 2008/09. To date FIA-FSP has funded 34 projects of relevance to impacts of the mountain pine beetle outbreak on biodiversity. For more information on the research program, see http://www.fia-fsp.ca. Completed project reports are found at
http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hcp/fia/searchreports.htm.
BIONews, Volume 19, Number 2
UVic to get world’s most precise microscope
$20-million scanning tool to arrive in 2011
Vancouer Sun – July 17, 2009
The University of Victoria will soon be home to the world’s most precise microscope, a tool capable of viewing the subatomic universe.
The microscope, expected to be delivered to the university in 2011, will allow scientists to see quasiparticles and materials far beyond the scope of the human eye.
The $20-million scanning transmission electron holography microscope (STEHM) is the first of its kind in the world, built especially for the university by Hitachi High-Technologies in Japan.
The microscope is also unique because of its ability to observe the inside of particles as well as the outside.
“Other scanning electron microscopes at the moment only look at surfaces of things,” said Dr. Elaine Humphrey, the university’s STEHM lab manager. “The STEHM will also look through things. It’s like 100 microscopes in one.”
Looking at the insides of brain cells, for example, will help scientists in their research on multiple sclerosis.
Catherine Karakatsanis installed as PEO President
Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO), the licensing body for professional engineers in the province, installed Catherine Karakatsanis as its 90th President during its annual general meeting on May 9. Karakatsanis succeeds J. David Adams, and will lead PEO’s 71,500 members and 4,900 interns. She will also chair its Council in 2009-2010. Karakatsanis is the fourth woman to be elected president of the association.
Karakatsanis is a senior vice president and board member at Morrison Hershfield, a consulting engineering and management firm with 12 offices across North America and over 700 employees. She heads up the building and facilities division, which provides multidisciplinary engineering expertise to the commercial, institutional, residential, industrial, and public sectors.
After graduating with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from The University of Western Ontario, Karakatsanis was a research assistant at the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory. She joined Morrison Hershfield in 1989 and has since had a diversified career with extensive engineering and management experience.
Karakatsanis has been an active volunteer in the engineering community for almost two decades, having served on numerous PEO and Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) committees; on the board of OSPE for five years and as OSPE president and chair. She also serves on the board of the Foundation for Education, and Western Engineering’s Advisory Committee.
Professional Engineers Ontario administers the Professional Engineers Act by licensing Ontario’s professional engineers, granting temporary, limited and provisional licenses to practice professional engineering, and authorizing businesses to provide engineering services to the public. It sets standards for and regulates engineering in Ontario so that the public interest is served and protected. Rigorously educated, experienced, and committed to a Code of Ethics that puts the public first, licensed professional engineers can be identified by the PEng after their names.
UBC researchers develop new method to study gambling addictions
UBC researchers have created the world’s first animal laboratory experiment to successfully model human gambling. The advance will help scientists develop and test new treatments for gambling addictions, a devastating condition that affects millions worldwide.
In addition to showing that rats can “play the odds,” the study finds that gambling decisions can be impaired or improved with drugs that affect brain dopamine and serotonin levels suggesting that these neurotransmitters may moderate gambling behaviour.
“For most individuals, gambling is enjoyable and harmless, but for others, it is as destructive as being addicted to drugs,” says Catharine Winstanley, an assistant professor in UBC’s Dept. of Psychology, whose study was published today in the Nature journal Neuropsychopharmacology.
“This new model is an important next step because the neurobiological basis of gambling is still poorly understood and few treatment options exist,” adds Winstanley, noting that gamblers experience higher rates of divorce, suicide and crime than non-gamblers. “It brings us a step closer to the goal of drug-based treatments for people suffering from gambling disorders.”
For the study, rats had a limited amount of time in which to choose between four gambling options which were associated with the delivery of different numbers of sugar pellets. If the animals won the gamble, they received the associated reward. However, if they lost, they experienced a time-out period during which reward could not be earned.
High-risk options offered more potential sugar pellets but also the possibility of more frequent and longer timeouts. Rats learned how to be successful gamblers, selecting the option with the optimum level of risk and reward to maximize their sugar pellet profits.
The study found that rodents treated with drugs that reduced their levels of serotonin levels – associated with impulse control in humans –dramatically reduced their ability to play the odds. A drug that reduced dopamine levels – associated with pleasure in humans – improved their ability to optimize profits. The findings are consistent with recent clinical findings in humans, helping to validate the technique as a model for studying human gambling behaviours.
“We hope this will speed up the development of gambling treatments for humans by giving us a working model to explore drugs and therapies,” says Winstanley, a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research scholar affiliated with the U.S.-based Institute for Research on Gambling Disorders.
In future studies, Winstanley says she will seek to replicate other aspects of human gambling behaviours, including “loss-chasing” – when a gambler follows a loss with a high-risk gamble – and the “near-miss effect,” when a near-win motivates individuals to continue gambling.
Women trade in office jobs for construction
The lure of making things has drawn more women to the construction trades
By Derek Sankey, Vancouver Sun – June 20, 2009Soon after Kathleen Greenan graduated from art school majoring in sculpture, she started receiving commissions to create two- and even three-storey structures.
She loved being in demand. But there was an important element missing from her education.
“I knew how to make art,” she says, “but I didn’t know how to build. It had no structural integrity.”
To remedy this, Greenan decided to learn carpentry by enrolling in the trades program at Calgary’s SAIT Polytechnic.
“I took this course and fell in love with carpentry instead of art,” she says. Four years later, she had her journeyman certification. Since then, Greenan has made it one of her goals to encourage more women to get into the trades.
“Women were stuck in dead-end jobs . . . constantly getting into (work) relationships that weren’t necessarily healthy, but it paid the bills,” she says. “My goal was to go and help educate them, help develop their skills.”
She came across an organization called the Vermilion/YWCA Skills Training Centre. A partnership of Vermilion Energy Trust and the YWCA of Calgary, the centre trains women in the basics of carpentry, dry walling, painting and tiling; many of the students receive federal and provincial funding.
The women earn about $12 an hour as a living wage while taking the course, which is open to anyone once they go through an assessment and screening process.It’s seen as one solution to what is expected to be a serious shortage of trades workers. Statistics Canada data forecasts Canada will need about one million skilled tradespeople in the next 10 years.
People like Jill Martin could help ease that shortage. She initially went to university to become a teacher, but after a few years in that occupation, she decided to go in another direction entirely and enrolled in a trades program at SAIT Polytechnic. She became a tile setter, moved into estimating, and is now pursuing a career in construction management by returning to school to specialize in that area. Martin also wants to help more women trade in their high heels for work boots.
The 27-year-old now teaches part-time at the Vermilion/YWCA Skills Training Centre, blending her teaching background with her technical trades knowledge.
“What it does is it gives women the opportunity to get skills in a trade and eliminate the cycle of poverty,” says Martin.
Across Canada, from BCIT to the Burlington Centre for Skills Development and Training and beyond, trades programs have begun to advertise heavily to women and are tailoring countless programs to them.
The YWCA is active in many communities, partnering with local training centres to dispel the notion that women can’t work in the trades.
Greenan says some barriers still exist, but she and others are working to remove them.
“A woman will always have to prove herself on every job,” she says. “If you move to another job with a different crew, you will have to prove yourself again, whereas with a guy he just kind of carries it in his back pocket.”
That shouldn’t stop women from forging careers in the trades, though.
“If you know how to do your work, you can get past most of that stuff,” says Greenan.
Tamara Pongracz is the chief instructor at BCIT’s Trades Discovery for Women program and says that although women represent about 50 per cent of the population, the message about opportunities in the trades doesn’t always reach them.
“Information about training options hasn’t filtered through,” says Pongracz.
Are girls smarter than boys?
Female students are leaving their male peers behind at a rate that is worrying some educators
By Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver Sun June 19, 2009It was three years ago, during his daughter’s high school graduation ceremony, that Peter Jensen noticed a trend he found disturbing: the vast majority of students crossing the stage to receive academic honours were female.
Jensen, a lawyer who had graduated from high school in the 1960s when boys dominated awards ceremonies, was taken aback. “There must have been 30 girls (on stage) before the first boy,” he recalled of the celebration at Argyle secondary school in North Vancouver.
While not longing for a return to the imbalance of yesteryear, he was shocked by the reversal of the numbers. He contacted the school to inquire if there was anything unusual about the 2006 graduating class and request a gender breakdown of the students receiving the school’s honours that year.
The data he received showed that Argyle girls had cleaned up on the boys in all grades and all award categories. In the distinguished honour roll, there were 84 girls and 44 boys; top scholars included 81 girls and 12 boys and the outstanding service award was given to 28 girls and 9 boys.
What surprised Jensen more than the numbers was the apparent lack of concern. “It seemed absolutely astonishing that Argyle and the district would have this data and not act upon it,” he said. Imagine if that gender balance were reversed, he remarked, “It would be considered a scandal.”
Jensen approached Argyle principal Peter Ewens and convinced him the school had a problem. When classes resumed that fall, Ewens called his department heads together and, according to meeting minutes, presented graphic evidence of “a huge gender inequity between Argyle girls’ and boys’ academic achievement.”
He distributed materials developed by Barry MacDonald, who became B.C.’s expert on boy learning after publishing a book called Boy Smarts – Mentoring Boys for Success at School. Ewens offered to cover the costs for anyone interested in attending MacDonald’s workshops.
But the next year, Ewens was transferred to Handsworth secondary school and the initiative was abandoned. Jensen, who had become passionate about what he regarded as a serious failing of the school system, was crestfallen. “Suddenly, I was back to square one,” he said.
District brushes off sex talk
Bruce Crowe became aware of the gender gap in North Vancouver schools in 2003, a year after he made the leap from parent leader to school board trustee.
He was attending a district luncheon to honour the top Grade 12 students from all North Vancouver schools. The room was packed with graduates, educators, business sponsors and politicians when the keynote speaker began his address. “I’m here to talk to you about sex,” Crowe recalled the speaker, a North Vancouver principal, saying.
The sex he wanted to talk about was the one that was under-represented among graduates attending the luncheon. Look around the room, the principal continued. “We have a problem.”
When Crowe met Jensen in 2008, the lawyer had been petitioning the district for two years to address the gender gap. He was growing frustrated, feeling that superintendent John Lewis and others in the district were giving him the brush-off.
Jensen and Crowe, who was no longer a trustee, decided to work together, and in October they fired off a letter to Lewis and then-education minister Shirley Bond outlining their concerns and complaining that no one was taking the issue seriously. “We are not froth-at-the-mouth people,” they stated. “We do this from a sense of alarm at what we have found.”
Ministry statistics provide ample evidence of the gender gap that has been observed by many during grad ceremonies. One set of statistics — the number of students receiving $1,000 provincial scholarships for excellent Grade 12 exam results — shows that hundreds more girls than boys win every year.
The Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA), the province’s annual test of basic skills in elementary schools, routinely identifies a significant gender gap in reading and writing, although not so much in math.
Last year, the tests found that 19 per cent of Grade 4 boys in B.C. and 14 per cent of the girls weren’t meeting expectations in reading. The figures were similar for writing with 23 per cent of boys and 13 per cent of girls not making the grade. In math, 21 per cent of boys and 22 per cent of girls weren’t up to par.
The Grade 7 results show the same gender gaps.
The differences are evident in graduation rates as well. Province-wide, 81 per cent of girls complete high school within the expected time frame while only 74 per cent of boys do the same.
University enrolments show similar trends. At the University of B.C. and Simon Fraser University, the male-female ratios of undergraduates are 46:54 and 45:55 respectively. At the University of Victoria, 41.6 per cent of students are male and 58.4 per cent are female.
Average marks for high-school boys began to plummet some time prior to 1995, but no one in B.C. was talking about it until 1997 when Patrick Clarke, a long-time teacher, was interviewed by The Vancouver Sun.
Clarke had been away from the classroom for a dozen years and when he returned to a teaching post at Alpha secondary in Burnaby, he was struck by the huge cultural shift that had occurred in his absence.
“To put it bluntly, the girls are running the place,” he told The Sun at the time.
Boys had slipped from the honour roll to the suspension list, and not just in Burnaby. Figures from around the province confirmed that female students were much more likely than male students to be successful in school.
The new education minister, Margaret MacDiarmid, acknowledges the problem. “It’s true, a greater number of girls than boys are graduating, scoring higher in provincial exams, receiving scholarships and moving on to post-secondary learning,” she said in a statement to The Vancouver Sun.
Nearly a third of B.C.’s 60 school districts have developed programs to improve boys’ performance, she added. “For example, some districts are engaging students differently and looking at research about brain function and developmental stages of boys and girls and how that affects learning.”
That suggests more than 40 districts are doing nothing.
Fear hinders boys’ learning
Elliott Squire and Negar Amiri are two students — one male, one female — who have done exceedingly well in North Vancouver schools. Both 17, they will graduate this month and continue their studies in September at UBC.
They acknowledged that girls generally experience more success than boys in high school, but suggest it may be a problem of boys lacking drive or neglecting their homework. “I’m not sure what the schools could do to fix it,” Squire said.
Roger van Renesse, who graduated from Argyle this month, suggested girls have an easier time asking questions and seeking help. When boys say they don’t understand something, everyone assumes they weren’t paying attention.
He proposed simple changes he said might help male students who have a hard time staying focused: Reduce the length of classes or allow short breaks and group work to break the monotony of lectures. This year, Argyle extended classes to 75 minutes. “After so long, my eyes start to drift to the clock and my focus is gone,” van Renesse said.
Amanda Wang, valedictorian at Sentinel secondary in West Vancouver, agreed girls are more willing to ask questions. “Guys get embarrassed easily and they want to appear cool,” she said. It doesn’t help that some girls laugh at their questions.
Girls may be more successful with awards and scholarships because they’re more likely than boys to be involved in their communities, and volunteer work is often taken into account, Wang said, adding: “Girls are more interested in socializing.”
MacDonald doesn’t purport to have all the answers, but he has spent a lot of time studying boy learning. Recently, he has turned his attention from B.C. to Ontario because he says that province is more interested in addressing the problem. “Here, people don’t want to talk about it.”
There is also a willingness in Ontario to work collaboratively to find answers. “In B.C., there is just an amazing amount of conflict,” he said, referring in particular to the decade-old battle over standardized testing.
The Ontario Teachers’ Federation recently wrote to MacDonald seeking advice on whether single-sex education is worth pursuing. The letter began: “In recent years, Ontario educators have been grappling with questions related to closing the significant gap between boys and girls on provincial assessments.”
That’s a letter he would never receive in B.C., he noted.
MacDonald doesn’t advocate a one-size-fits-all approach to learning and doesn’t pit boys against girls. Rather, he said teachers need to explore ways of reaching all students along the male-female continuum with a variety of instructional approaches.
Scholarship gap persists
North Vancouver superintendent John Lewis acknowledges girls have a slight edge over boys in some subjects but says that’s not surprising given their earlier maturation. When boys become men, they catch up, he said.
He refused to comment on the complaints from Jensen and Crowe, but in response to the issues at Argyle, he said it isn’t unusual for a school to have a cohort of students with particular problems and then develop strategies to address those problems. Argyle responded to the issue and moved on, he added.
Yet, the distribution of provincial scholarships in North Vancouver suggests the gender gap persists. Last year, 75 recipients were female and 46 were male and the year before, there were 112 girls and 70 boys.
Asked what schools might do to assist boys, Lewis said identifying language problems in kindergarten would be helpful, in that teachers could provide early support to children with low literacy skills, many of whom are boys. As well, he said it’s important to help students build strong academic and social connections with their schools.
Jensen and Crowe both have sons and daughters. They say their fight will continue, but it’s not on behalf of their own offspring, who are well established and supported. Rather, they say, it is for the boys, who are falling through the cracks and have been for years.
Their talk has now turned to litigation. “I have tried to work within the system, but I’m over that now,” Jensen said.
Enhancing Essential Professional Skills workshops
Enhancing Essential Professional Skills
The goal of the program Enhancing Essential Professional Skills is to equip women with the necessary skills to effectively and creatively manage their teams just before they begin their independent careers.
Enhancing Essential Professional Skills aims to deliver skills training to prepare scientists to meet the interpersonal challenges they will encounter throughout their postdoctoral experience and beyond.
Critical to success in the postdoctoral experience and beyond is a researcher’s ability to communicate and manage complex issues and concerns among multiple levels of people and roles within an academic or an industry setting. A series of three workshops will lay the foundation for the kind of interpersonal awareness and skills required to promote satisfying work relationships and functional work teams. The interactive workshops will introduce basic communication concepts such as active listening, open questioning, and giving and receiving feedback, and build on that foundation to introduce the theory and skills linked to group dynamics and leadership. Such skills will be appropriate to effectively interact with or facilitate groups and teams of people, whether the goal is to brainstorm ideas, solve problems or make group decisions.
Three interactive workshops will be offered throughout the 2009-10 academic year. Two will be half day sessions facilitated by Sally Halliday, and one will be a half day facilitated by Julie Stitt. Workshops will be offered in November 2009 and February 2010.
Workshop One: Basic Communication Skills: Enhancing Interpersonal Communication (Facilitator: Sally Halliday)
• Outline workshop objectives
• Introduction of basic communication theory
• Skill introduction and practice: active listening, clarifying, paraphrasing
• Using questions to understand and clarify
• Giving and receiving feedback
• Action Plan: linking knowledge to action
Workshop Two: Team Dynamics & Skills (Facilitator: Sally Halliday)
• Overview of group dynamics theory
• The role of Leader/Facilitator: can it ever be neutral?
• What makes a good group Facilitator?
• Basic skills for leading work teams
• Dealing with challenging situations
• Action Plan: linking knowledge to practice
Workshop Three: Salary Negotiation (Facilitator: Julie Stitt)
• What is salary negotiation?
• What will you negotiate for? (What factors do you need to consider? What information do you need to have at your fingertips?)
• What do you want in your work experience?
• How will you use your budget, your financial goals and the “going rate” for a position in your negotiations?
• What strategy do you use when having the “Negotiation” conversation?
Specific details on dates, location and registration to follow.
Funding generously provided by the JADE Project.
Facilitator bios:
Sally Halliday, M.A. RCC (Counselling Psychology) is principal of Sally Halliday Counselling and Consulting Services. In addition to counselling individuals and couples in her private practice and Employee Assistance work, Sally develops and teaches courses at UBC Life and Career Centre. Sally combines her academic research on transitions with her practical experience as a teacher, counsellor and former journalist to help others who are making decisions during times of change. Sally teaches skiing in her spare time.
Julie Stitt is an organisational development specialist at the University of British Columbia. Julie spent a decade working in all facets of career development from directing UBC’s Career Services to writing curriculum for Women in Trades programs. As Manager of Organisational Development and Training (UBC Land and Building Services) Julie combines her facilitation skills with her passion for organizational development in a role that focuses on increasing the organisational effectiveness of one of UBC’s largest divisions. She has a B.A. from Queen’s, post-baccalaureate certificates in Human Resources and Internet Marketing, and an M.A. in Leadership and Training. She has served on the boards of a number of not-for-profit organisations and has trained not-for-profit board directors through Volunteer Vancouver. She lives in Vancouver with her partner and two sons.
Astronaut Julie Payette about to double the Canadian content in Earth orbit
She will join countryman Bob Thirsk on the International Space Station
By Teresa Smith – Vancouver Sun – June 8, 2009
Canadian astronaut Julie Payette is gearing up to make history June 13, when she takes off to join fellow Canadian Bob Thirsk on the International Space Station. They will be the first two Canadians to be in space at the same time.
Payette, the mission’s flight engineer, will be part of the cockpit crew that navigates the shuttle Endeavour during flight and docks it to the space station on June 15. “We’re at the point now where everybody is gearing up to launch,” she said at recent news conference. “We’re looking forward to [our mission] and . . . finishing the construction of the International Space Station.” Payette, who lives and works in Houston, is in final training now, preparing to go into quarantine before the launch.
Marc Garneau, the first Canadian to go into space, said that Payette is undoubtedly very excited right now.
“It’s when you go into quarantine that you get the sense that your mission is imminent,” said Garneau. “All that training is coming to an end and now it’s time to execute the mission.
“The time goes by quickly, and in the last two or three days, you have a chance to see your family . . . to have some quiet time before the launch.” Payette will operate three robotic arms during the mission—the shuttle’s Canadarm, the station’s Canadarm2 and an arm on the Japanese laboratory, Kibo, located outside the station.
Astronauts will use Canadian robotic technology almost every day of the 16-day mission in order to finish building the station.
“We have a very visible presence on the ISS,” said Garneau, “Not just when we have people up there, but because of all the Canadian equipment, we’re visible even when we don’t have astronauts on board.” They are also continuing Garneau’s work. He installed the first solar panels on the space station in 2000 and part of Payette’s mission is to change the batteries that those panels charge. “The batteries have a limited lifetime,” Garneau said. “So, the fact that they need to be changed is an indication that the ISS has been up there for a while.” Benoit Marcotte, director general of operations for the Canadian Space Agency, said he is excited about Canada’s continuing role in the 25-year partnership. “The work on the ISS continues to be a great partnership in which Canada will continue to play a significant role,” he said.
SCWIST member Adele Diamond wins YWCA Woman of Distinction award!
Dr. Adele Diamond, Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, UBC, and Canada Research Chair received the YWCA Woman of Distinction award for Technology, Science and Industry at the YWCA’s awards gala on June 3. A pioneer in the fields of cognitive development and neuroscience, her discoveries have significantly improved our understanding and medical treatment of phenylketonuria, autism and ADHD.
SCWIST members Dr. Judy Illes, Dr. Margo Moore and Dr. Elizabeth Croft were also nominated in this prestigious category. The recognition is truly well-deserved. Congratulations!!
Wed Feb 01
