Tag Archives: Ian Brown

Nano valentine; Owning the podium and science at the Olympics in French; Introduction to three part interview with Cheryl Geisler

Yesterday, I meant to post about the nano Valentine’s Day card that scientists at Birmingham University’s Nanoscale Physics Research Lab made out of pure palladium. From the university’s  news release (thanks to Azonano where I first spotted this item),

Making the card was also a work of love; clusters of palladium atoms bonded together on the surface of carbon and spontaneously arranged themselves into the world’s smallest heart.

Here’s the card,

Palladium Valentine, 8 nm in size, from Birmingham University's Nanoscale Physics Research Laboratory

Now on to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, “Own the Podium” or “À nous le podium” and science in a very illuminating podcast (French language) on Je vote pour la science.

I first heard about the “Own the Podium” government sports/science initiative, although not by that name, early last week from a friend in England where it was being discussed in the media. I saw nothing here until the Globe and Mail (G&M) article, Is Canada a Spoilsport? (pp. F1 & F6) by Ian Brown in the Feb. 13, 2010 edition, but I assumed that’s because I don’t follow sports closely. After listening to the Josée Nadia Drouin and Pascal Lapointe (both of Quebec’s Agence Science-Presse) podcast on Je vote pour la science, I realized that the programme has been kept somewhat quiet until lately.

My French comprehension is spotty but I gathered from the podcast that the government devoted some $117M for sports in preparation for the Olympics, from the G&M article that athletes were given a stipend of $18,000 for living expenses (doesn’t sound like much to me), and from the podcast, again, that money was given to 55 Centres of Excellence in 7 universities for scientific research supporting athletic efforts.

I do think that we should better support our athletes but I abhor the programme name,  Own the Podium, which suggests that winning is the prime motive for competing. This is noxious when you consider the intent of the Olympics as expressed by Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, (from Wikipedia here citing Christopher R. Hill’s 1996 book Olympic Politics)

The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.

As for the Olympics and science, Lapointe and Drouin also focused on surveillance. Unfortunately for me, their correspondent was on a poor telephone line and that combined with my French comprehension skills means I got very little data but the conflation of science, surveillance, and sporting events gave me an expanded perspective.

For my final bit today, I’m introducing Dr. Cheryl Geisler, the new dean for the new Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology (FCAT) at Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, Canada). She very kindly gave me an interview in early February about her new faculty and her plans.

I’m providing some background before posting the interview. From the SFU website, the university has approximately 32,000 students and 900 faculty as of the 20007 annual report which contrasts somewhat with Geisler’s previous home institution, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (located in Troy, NY with approximately 7700 students and 450 faculty as of Fall 2009. from their website).

I did encounter some difficulty finding numbers of students, faculty and administrative staff for individual departments and faculties (FCAT has five admin staff) at both universities and am not sure if this is innocence (nobody has considered making the information available) or strategy (i.e., universities prefer to keep the information discreet although it can be obtained if you’re willing  [spelling corrected Feb.17.10] to dig deep enough). ETA (Feb.17.10): I was kindly provided with a link to FCAT’s wikipedia entry where I found that there are 1861 undergraduate students and 208 graduate students for a total of 2069 students with 79 continuing full time faculty members. According to the wikipedia entry, this information is available at the SFU website on this page in a category titled Headcounts. It is part of the SFU website which belongs to Institutional Research and Planning.

As for Dr. Geisler herself, she holds a PhD in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University (main campus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), an MS in Reading from Western Illinois University, and a BA in English from Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota). Prior to her move, she had been affiliated with Rensselaer in one fashion or another since 1986.

The most exotic thing on her CV (obtained from the Rensselaer website in October 2009) is a two year stint in Jerusalem as a teacher of English as a foreign language. She has some experience with Canada as an outside reviewer for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in 2000 for their Valuing Literacy in Canada programme.

Taken as a whole, her CV is an impressive document. At Rensselaer, she taught courses such as Techniques for the Analysis of Verbal Data; Proposing and Persuading; and the Literacy Seminar: Theories of Mediation, Technology and Text. She has written widely and (along with partners) holds two patents in addition to administering federal government grants for a number of different projects.

I cherrypicked, there’s a lot more to Dr. Geisler’s CV but I think the point has been made. Tomorrow (Feb. 17, 2010), I start a three part series, Off the deep end: an interview with Cheryl Geisler Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.