U of T leads consortium
Put simply, it’s a $210 million deal to help smart people use fancy computers to tackle some of the biggest problems of modern life, from traffic jams and old buildings that waste energy to getting better at treating disease. read more
U of T prof on the trend of working far from home
Super-commuting is on the rise, according to a fascinating new report by Mitchell Moss and Carson Qing of NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. read more
Scientists have uncovered the first archeological evidence that Homo erectus, an ancestor of modern humans, used fire. read more
Pharaoh was a woman
A team of Canadian archeologists has unearthed a rare wooden statue of a pharaoh at a dig site in southern Egypt, and clues suggest the figure may be an important new representation of Hatshepsut — the great female king who enjoyed a long and successful reign about 3,500 years ago, but was almost erased from [...]
Diverging ward population leads to differential representation
Even without robo-calls and winner-take-all elections, Canada’s claim to democracy is growing strained. read more
Professor Jeffrey Reitz on the challenges that face an invisible workforce
On February 6, in a collision between a van and a truck on a rural road near Stratford, Ontario, 11 people died, 10 of them temporary agricultural workers. Most were from Peru. With this horrific crash, the eyes of many Canadians were opened to a little-known sector of the Canadian workforce – migrant workers. In [...]
Go for a facelift, shed six years. Throw in eyelid work and a brow lift and you could shave a total of eight years off your looks. read more
UTM English professor Mari Ruti takes on the self-help industry in her book The Case for Falling in Love
Professor Mari Ruti of the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga has written about love for both academic and mainstream audiences. Her newest book, The Summons of Love, portrays love as a much more complex, multifaceted phenomenon than we tend to appreciate—an experience that helps us encounter the depths of [...]
The Paradox of the Disinhibited
Power can lead to great acts of altruism, but also corruptive, unethical behavior. Being intoxicated can lead to a first date, or a bar brawl. And the mask of anonymity can encourage one individual to let a stranger know they have toilet paper stuck to their shoe, while another may post salacious photos online. What [...]
Using Microsoft Kinect as a teaching tool
To video gamers, the name Microsoft Kinect is synonymous with the Xbox 360 video game console. To University of Toronto graduate student Uzma Khan, the motion-sensing input device offered a myriad of other possibilities. Khan, a master’s degree student in applied computing, used the course Topics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to explore the ways Kinect might [...]
