Early in October, I was lucky enough to catch The Interrupters at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, a documentary produced by academy award winning director Steve James (though it is no longer playing at the Lightbox, a list of future screenings can be found at the film’s website). As a note, TIFF generally screens films throughout the year, often with the director in attendance, and often presents special themed screenings. I totally recommend checking out their list of current and future showings. For the same price as going to Cineplex or AMC, you can’t go wrong.

The Interrupters focuses on a group called ‘CeaseFire’ who work in their native Chicago neighborhoods to diffuse violence and aggression between rival gangs, friends, and even brothers. Violent confrontations can be everyday occurrences in some of Chicago’s neighborhoods and arise from as simple of an event as making eye contact with the ‘wrong’ individual. CeaseFire spends their nights out on the streets trying to stop violence before it happens, by placing themselves where such events are likely to occur, and in essence, putting themselves in danger. Read the rest »

(a)	(b)	(c)
Figure 1. Our nameless hero’s figure 1-A (a), Professor Brian S. Smith (Genius) in papyro (b) and in vivo (c).

It was a full house at Friday’s screening of the PhD movie, based on the comic series “Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham. Even if you’ve somehow memorized the entire comic series and can recognize much of the dialogue, lifted directly off the panes of the comic strip, the movie adds a whole new dimension: real-life actors. They’ve nailed the casting! Figures 1b and 1c give representations of Professor Brian S. Smith (Genius) in 2D and in 3D, respectively. It can be seen that actor Zachary Abbot has successfully cloned Prof. Smith, right down to the migrated hair and green vest.

Figure 2. PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

Read the rest »

I was hanging out on the internet on a Friday night and came across a post by a former Amazon employee about presenting to his boss, Jeff Bezos.

I’ll post the relevant snippets here (out of context), and it really does read like advice you should be getting about approaching graduate committee meetings. It’s a bit long, use your imagination and substitute Jeff Bezos with your supervisor or any of your committee members.

Disclaimer: Some of this is definitely tongue in cheek, please use your judgement when actually applying these tips.

Over the years I watched people give presentations to Jeff Bezos and come back bruised: emotionally, intellectually, often career-ily. If you came back with a nod or a signoff, you were jumping for joy. Presenting to Jeff is a gauntlet that tends to send people back to the cave to lick their wounds and stay out of the sunlight for a while.

Read the rest »

The Good Food Box program is run by a non-profit organization dedicated to supplying fresh fruits and vegetables to the community at wholesale prices. Produce is purchased directly from local farmers whenever possible, and packed and delivered by volunteers. This keeps the cost low, supports local agriculture and minimizes the fuel used for transportation.

Sign up to receive a box of fresh, seasonal and affordable produce every two weeks. The cost varies from $13 for a Small Good Food Box to $34 for a Large Organic Good Food Box. You can check out more detailed descriptions and pricing information at http://www.foodshare.net/goodfoodbox05.htm.

Contact Chelsea (room S640) for more information or to order a box:
chelsea.munding@utoronto.ca
416-948-1554 ext. 3383

U.S. National Medal of Science 1999. Left to right: Kenneth L. Thompson, Dennis M. Ritchie, Bill Clinton
[Photo credit http://www.bell-labs.com/news/1999/april/28/1.html]

Some of you may not have heard of Dennis Ritchie, but you are most certainly familiar with his work. In fact, you’re probably using several technologies derived from his work at this very moment! Ritchie is the creator of the C programming language, arguably the most influential programming language since Assembly. He began working at AT&T Bell Labs in 1967 after completing a B.Sc. in physics and applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1963 and shortly before earning his Ph.D. in computer science, also from Harvard, in 1968. Back in the 60s, computers were a huge thing…so huge that one could easily fill a room, or two. Read the rest »

Science Exchange Logo

Think about the times that you’ve wished that someone more experienced could perform your experiments for you. Just imagine how much time it would save. Well now there is a solution: outsourcing your experiments. ScienceExchange.com, a recently launched start-up helps scientists do just that by providing an online platform where scientists can connect and experiments (or specific components of an experiment) can be outsourced to better-prepared facilities. This small company based out of Palo Alto, CA, first launched out of Miami by its three co-founders: Dr. Elizabeth Iorns, Ryan Abbott and Dan Knox. I would imagine that this is what results out of putting a breast cancer researcher (Dr. Iorns) and two young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in one room.

Science exchange offers (as a first product) to act as a research middleman. It does so by facilitating collaboration between scientists. Their aim is to make outsourcing experiments to institutes with large core facilities and major universities easy for scientists located in places lacking equipment and skill sets. Their team will essentially deal with all billing, money transfer, quality assurance and dispute resolutions required to make the science happen. In theory, this would then allow scientists outsourcing experiments to better focus on other, perhaps more crucial, aspects of their work instead of purchasing new equipment, training new staff or hiring a graduate student to re-develop an already existing technique in the laboratory.  Read the rest »

" I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come. "
- Steve Jobs, August 24, 2011


Those are the now chilling words that Steve Jobs penned to the shareholders of Apple and the broader Apple Community. If you have followed Steve Jobs’ career and life as zealously as many of us have, you knew that was cause for worry and concern. Despite this final harbinger of despair however, many of us in the ‘broader Apple Community’ held out hope – perhaps foolishly and certainly naively that Steve’s eventual passing was still months and years away.

It wasn’t… if you haven’t heard yet, Steve Jobs passed away last night, 42 days after he formally stepped down as CEO of his company and legacy, Apple.

Read the rest »

Hello everyone,

We are preparing an exciting new addition to this year’s Geneva Park: Family Feud.

For those of you that aren’t aware of how Family Feud works, here’s a wikipedia link so you can get up to speed.

In order to make this event work, we need YOU to respond to some survey questions. Go ahead and fill this out, and your responses will be tallied for the game.

Thanks for playing!

First time visitors, welcome to the MBP Graduate Student Union website! Returning readers, welcome back! This website is created and designed for you by the MBP blog team. We strive to bring you articles and posts covering a diverse range of topics that we hope you’ll find thought-provoking, useful, and/or hilarious. Drop us a line on our Contact page and let us know what you think of your website.

Better yet, share your thoughts and ideas with the whole department by joining our blog team! We invite MBP students of all years and streams to contribute. You can choose just about any topic that you find interesting, from what’s growing in your Petri dish to fashion in the lab, from whom you saw at the film festival to recipes for the student on the go, etc. Joining is easy: just email webmaster@mbpgsu.ca and we’ll help you get started.

Even if you think you won’t have time to contribute regularly, we encourage guest postings. For example, send us a short blurb the next time your paper is accepted and we’ll feature your publication in our Academic blog.

From all of us on the MBP blog team, we hope that you learn lots, get great results, publish often, and have fun this upcoming year!

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