Published by the SPT, a student society of McGill University
Keep on Commuting
April 5, 2022
Gino McTuff’s journey to the library
March 29, 2022
Keep on Commuting
April 5, 2022
Gino McTuff’s journey to the library
March 29, 2022
Keep on Commuting
April 5, 2022
Gino McTuff’s journey to the library
March 29, 2022
Keep on Commuting
April 5, 2022
Gino McTuff’s journey to the library
March 29, 2022
On Jan. 24, the Principal’s Task Force on Respect and Inclusion in Campus Life held an open forum for students, faculty, and staff to voice their opinions and suggestions regarding campus inclusivity. The task force, which was announced in an email on Oct. 25 2017, is mandated to hold consultations with the McGill community and deliver a final report to the McGill Senate with recommendations about how to promote academic freedom and inclusiveness on campus.
The open forum was streamed online, and viewers were invited to provide their input to the task force’s administrators via email. It was divided into three main rounds of discussion: Defining campus inclusion, brainstorming methods of improving inclusion, and suggesting tangible plans for the administration.
Faculty and students’ attempt to define inclusion and respect
John Poliquin, staffing manager at McGill Human Resources, moderated the first discussion about the inclusivity of McGill’s environment. Laila Parsons, associate professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies, opened debate by criticizing the administration’s response to the controversial Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which advocates against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
“The BDS is a normal method of activism, [and] the University’s condemnation of the BDS exacerbated the tensions,” Parsons said.
Morley Kert, U2 Engineering, attended the first debate, and agreed that the discussion surrounding BDS on campus could be more inclusive.
“On one hand, I agree with the fact that McGill shouldn’t be condemning activism, but on the other hand, McGill should promote open forums like this so people who have different opinions can debate their ideas,” Kert said.
Suggestions for actionable plans to make campus more inclusive
Fatima Anjum, a Faculty of Law student, moderated the second discussion.
Kert shared their belief that McGill should continue to host one-on-one debates and open discussion events similar to the task force forum.
“Open debates and confrontations with people who have different views make us stronger and better prepared for the real world,” Kert said. “We are still young and developing, there is no need to take firm stances on our beliefs in this stage of our lives.”
The discussion shifted its focus toward the limits of free speech. Some audience members defended their right to speak freely, and criticized initiatives like Rez Projects—mandatory training workshops on diversity and inclusion for students living in McGill residences—for imposing restrictions on free speech. Others argued that unregulated freedom of speech harms minority students.
“There is a reason why we don’t invite people like Donald Trump or Jordan Peterson [to speak at McGill],” Arno Pedram, U3 Arts, said. “The level of debate needs to be limited when dealing with extremists, and the question of free speech always has to balance with [concerns about] security.”
Administration collects feedback from students
Assistant Professor David Theodore of Mcgill’s School of Architecture moderated the third discussion, during which students could directly communicate with faculty. Many participants requested for professors to provide their course syllabi before semesters begin to simplify the add/drop period.
The forum concluded with closing remarks by Nandini Ramanujam, executive director at the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism.
“Many of you would like to have more of an enabling environment for inclusive, respective dialogue [and] conversations, looking in the eye, one-on-one conversations,” Ramanujam said. “We are all McGill, so we all have a responsibility to make McGill a better place. [But] of course the administration will take your comments and suggestions very seriously.”
The task force will continue to receive email suggestions on how to improve campus inclusivity until March 30.
The Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) has begun the hiring process for a new staff position that will investigate and report on research into military technology carried out in McGill’s laboratories. The Harmful Military Technology Researcher will work for an hourly wage on average six hours a week reviewing documents related to military research conducted at the University. They will also deliver accessible reports to the student body on the topic.
“The Harmful Military Technology Researcher will analyze documents related to military research on campus, as obtained by students through Access to Information requests,” the job description reads. “They will be expected to compile summary results in order to inform future campaigns and popular education materials on these topics.”
SSMU is mandated by its 2015 Policy for a Campus Free from Military Technology to oppose the development of military technology at McGill. The Policy obligates SSMU to oppose research into harmful military technology, and transparently consider its social responsibility when deciding research contracts. Vice-President (VP) External of SSMU, Connor Spencer, explained the role of the Researcher in an email to The McGill Tribune.
“This position was actually created by last year’s executive, but, from as far as we can see, [nobody] was never hired, or at least the research results were never collected,” Spencer wrote. “[The purpose of the position is] to figure out exactly what research is happening on campus in order to inform the students.”
Spencer referenced the importance of drawing attention to military research, as SSMU’s Policy for a Campus Free from Military Technology is set to expire in 2020.
“The VP University Affairs [Isabelle Oke] and I decided that it was important that we make sure that we have this research [on military technology at McGill] in order to inform a discussion amongst our members, as our policy is expiring and therefore will have to be brought to the next [General Assembly] to see if members want us to take a position again,” Spencer wrote.
Student opposition to military research is not unprecedented. In February 2016, a York University student group rallied at York’s Student Centre in protest of military research conducted on their campus.
At McGill, the student activist group Demilitarize McGill and similar movements have been pushing the University to divest from military research since the 1980s, according to the group’s website. McGill has been involved in research ranging from MK ULTRA’s drug and psychological experiments, to using powdered metals for energy, an experiment funded by Canada’s Department of Defense. Students less frequently use institutional channels like SSMU to voice their opposition to military research.
Chlöe Shahinian, U1 Arts, thinks the new SSMU position is a step in the right direction.
“If we want to be a university that is becoming increasingly conscious of our research and how that research can affect the world around us, I think that it is positive to have a position that will [investigate McGill’s research on] harmful military technology,” Shahinian said.
Others, like Brinton Wolever, U1 Management, worry that SSMU is overstepping its mandate.
“I don’t believe SSMU should be involved with external affairs,” Wolever said. “I also think it is a bit above a student union to declare what’s right and wrong as far as the use of military resources go.”
According to McGill Vice-President (Research and Innovation) Martha Crago, the administration recognizes SSMU’s right to create the position.
“The appropriateness of the new position […] is a question for SSMU, which is the body responsible for making this decision,” Crago wrote in an email to the Tribune.
Meanwhile, some staff have vocally supported such initiatives. Associate Professor Andrew Higgins of the Department of Mechanical Engineering conducts research in McGill’s Shock Wave Physics Group, which Demilitarize McGill describes as the university’s longest-standing military research lab. Higgins encourages efforts to promote an awareness of McGill’s research.
“I feel it is entirely appropriate for students to examine the research ongoing at their university,” Higgins wrote in an email to the Tribune. “In fact, I welcome it.”
Higgins’ findings about shockwaves and high-speed combustion have often gained the attention of the Canadian Department of National Defense, though he has not conducted any research in partnership with a defense contractor.
“I have never been involved in weapons contracts,” Higgins wrote. “As for indirect or unintended consequences, this is an issue for all research. Almost all research can be harmful, and students should certainly be aware of the research on-going on their campus.”
Charlie Brooker’s harrowing British sci-fi series Black Mirror returned to Netflix with six new episodes exploring multiple technologies of questionable ethics. From the digital uploading of human minds to predictive neuroscience technology, the show’s fourth season illuminated some frightening, futuristic concepts. But with real-life advancements in brain imaging, artificial intelligence, and computer processing, this future may not be all that far away. The McGill Tribune digs deep to decipher the science behind Black Mirror. Consider yourself warned: Minor season spoilers will follow.
VISUAL RECONSTRUCTION
Visual reconstruction, or the ability to reconstruct perceived images, was used by the mother in “Arkangel” to monitor her child and the officials in “Crocodile” to gather short clips of memory for investigations. Being able to “see” what another person sees with brain recordings is a relatively new, but rapidly-expanding, field of study for scientists in neuroimaging.
Most studies in image reconstruction so far have used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to read brain activity. FMRI relies on magnetic fields to detect changes in the blood flow within the brain. Increased blood flow to a certain region indicates that the region is more active.
With these fMRI readings, scientists use computer software to convert brain activity into reconstructed images. Using neural networks, these created images vary from person to person, and theoretically could be used to reconstruct memories and mental images.
In terms of its applicability, this method of scanning and processing has already been proven to work for simple letters, short video clips, and, yes, even human faces. While the results are impressive, they are miles behind the crisp, detailed reconstructions of the characters in Black Mirror. In these studies, unfortunately, the resolution of recreated images have all been low-quality.
Most of the aforementioned studies have focused on the early visual cortex, the first region of the brain to receive visual information from the eyes. Recently, scientists have started using higher-level areas of the brain in fMRI scans. These areas are the latter parts of the visual pathway, and are related to more subjective experiences like memory, imagination, dreams, and face recognition.
MIND UPLOADING
Episodes like “USS Callister,” “Hang the DJ,” and “Black Museum” used technology to digitally upload human minds to computers. In “Black Museum,” for example, a museum owner reveals that the main attraction of his business is the hologram of a convicted criminal. His body, his mind, and his ability to feel pain remain digitally intact. Could such a thing as an uploadable human mind exist in the real world?
Accelerating advances in both brain imaging and computer simulations have led computer scientists and entrepreneurs like Ray Kurzweil to believe that the ability to live permanently in a simulation could become commonplace as soon as the year 2045. Others are skeptical.
Groups like the Allen Brain Atlas and The Blue Brain Project have studied and attempted to replicate the entire connectivity of rodent brains. Aptly called connectomes, these maps represent the specific way in which different brain regions are linked and how they interact with one another. However, even the brains of mice have proven difficult to recreate on the microscopic, cellular level, where many higher-level functions like cognition, consciousness, and behaviour are thought to emerge. A biologically-realistic recreation of the human brain won’t happen any time soon.
This hasn’t stopped scientists from using this brain imaging to run experiments on digital brains, albeit for less insidious purposes than in Black Mirror. Because the whole brain, with its 86 billion neurons, remains too complicated to replicate, neuroscientists are using computers to build simplified versions of the human brain with lower resolutions. They can then use these digital brains to study changes in cases of epilepsy or Alzheimer’s.
Despite being far-fetched at times, Black Mirror provides its viewers with cautionary tales of what could happen if the designers of a new technology were to completely disregard their ethical obligations. As technology advances in complexity and control, so must our self-awareness, and so must our humanity.
Although at first glance just a colorful and simple game, the Rubik’s Cube has been used in both competitions and mathematical research. The puzzle’s main objective is to recreate the original positioning (one color per side) by rotating the cube’s six faces. Originally called the ‘Magic Cube’ by its Hungarian inventor Erno Rubik, over 350 million have been sold since 1974.
According to the New York Post, Rubik himself originally could not solve his eponymous cube, although he was eventually able to complete it. Raymond Tran, a Computer Science graduate at UBC, explained the challenges of solving the puzzle in a mathematical essay paper.
“The cube is not easily solved because it does not hve a definite scrambled point,” Tran wrote. “This means that there is only one completed situation, where all the sides have one color each.”
In fact, there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (43 quintillion) possible orientations, or permutations, for a 3x3x3 cube. This makes solving the cube solely by making random moves unreasonable.
It’s far from impossible to solve, however: It is currently estimated that the smallest number of moves needed to solve the cube from any starting position is as low as 20 moves. This number is commonly referred to as God’s Number.
Solving the 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube mathematically primarily relies on a branch of algebra called group theory. When using group theory, mathematicians have shown that solving the Rubik’s Cube is almost trivial. In mathematics, a group consists of a set of objects and a binary operator which satisfy a certain mathematical conditions.
A permutation group is a finite group G whose elements are permutations of a given set and whose group operation is composition of permutations in G.
In other words, a permutation group is a set whose elements consist of different orderings of a finite list and whose group operation is the permutations which reorder the set in a different way. Therefore, the 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube is a permutation group as it can be represented as an ordered list of 54 elements (six different colours, repeated nine times on individual cubes). In addition, since the cube’s six faces can rotate, these rotations can be considered operations or permutations.
Now, consider the Rubik’s Cube in this analogy: The cube permutations are group elements and the sequence of rotations of a face of the cube are binary operators. Move sequences can be viewed as permutations, or rearrangements of the cube where different move sequences that produce the same cube arrangement are considered the same permutation.
The hard part of solving the Rubik’s Cube is placing an individual piece in its correct location without affecting the rest of the cube. No move can exchange a single pair of individual cube pieces. In other words, moving a side of the cube will affect the position of other pieces as well. However, by using 3-cycles, or cycles of three individual cube pieces, one can effectively swap two cube pieces per cycle. Therefore, by using a series of moves which cycle between elements, one can achieve the same result as swapping two individual pieces directly.
To solve a Rubik’s Cube mathematically, the properties of cube group elements are needed to develop ‘macros,’ or special combinations of cube moves that will accomplish specific cube rearrangements. In The Mathematics of the Rubik’s Cube, it is noted that, by measuring the number of individual cubes changed by performing a sequence of moves, the required additional moves needed to reverse unwanted changes can be determined. It follows that useful pairs of moves typically only change a small number of individual pieces. These useful pairs of moves are called commutators. By applying a series of moves and their inverse operations, commutators ensure that only the desired piece is affected by a series of moves. Commutators are combined to build macros which ultimately describe an algorithm to solve the puzzle.
To actually complete a Rubik’s Cube, one straightforward approach is to solve it layer by layer. The difficult part is maintaining each layer’s structure as you further complete the cube. Suppose we want to flip two pieces but leave the other layers intact. We can ensure this by performing a rotation before applying our macro that will reverse the undesired change when the macro is applied.
Although the Rubik’s Cube was originally created as a puzzle, its intricacies have been marvelled over for many years by both hobbyists and mathematicians. By understanding the math behind how the Rubik’s Cube works, anyone can become an expert.
On Jan. 27, the McGill Martlet (8-2) basketball team turned the tables to defeat the Bishop’s University Gaiters (5-6) 66-57 in the second of two back-to-back games—the first of which they lost 40-52.
The Martlets started off strong in the first quarter, finishing the period ahead 16-12. They were unable to maintain their lead, however, falling behind by two after the second quarter. Bishop’s won the third quarter as well, entering the final period holding a 51-46 lead.
In the fourth quarter, the Martlets showed defensive grit and discipline, shutting the Gaiters out for nearly seven minutes while putting up 11 straight points. Martlet Head Coach Ryan Thorne spoke to the intensity of the game and commended his team’s bounce back from the night before.
“This game was a battle,” Thorne said. “It tested us. Every game is a grind [….] We shot better today and made some better decisions.”
With one three-pointer from third-year guard Gladys Hakizimana and two from first-year guard Charlotte Clayton in the fourth quarter, McGill kept control of the game until the final whistle. Clayton, who came off the bench in the first, made four three-pointers in the entire game.
“Charlotte’s game was amazing,” Thorne said. “She was more confident [….] She has the ability to shoot the ball. She can attack and defend, so she is a triple threat.
Clayton leads her rookie class in minutes this season, including 18 in Friday’s loss and 26 in Saturday’s win. She credited her team’s comeback victory to their emphasis on teamwork.
“We weren’t really working together yesterday,” Clayton said. “We weren’t reading things properly either. Today we focused more on ourselves and working together.”
Fourth-year Marie-Love Michel, who slotted in as a starting wing, put up 12 points alongside a solid defensive performance. After Friday night’s loss, she amped up her physicality in the rematch to help the Martlets secure a win.
“We were more aggressive,” Michel said. “All the starting fives, we started right from the beginning. Last night we lost to the same team, and I wasn’t as aggressive, so today I tried to get steals and be more aggressive.”
The RSEQ-leading Martlets have six games remaining in the regular season, which include three marquee matchups against the second-place Université Laval Rouge et Or. The Martlets head to Quebec City on Feb. 1 before returning to host Laval on Feb. 3 in Love Competition Hall.
After forcing turnovers on two consecutive Bishop’s inbound attempts, fourth-year wing Marie-Love Michel scored two layups and earned an additional point from the freethrow line—good for five points in 10 seconds at the end of the first quarter.
“We want to improve our mindset for the game. We think we are the best team in the country but we have to show it every game and every time. And we are working on that and working on going to playoffs and finishing first in the league.” – Martlet fourth-year wing Marie-Love Michel
McGill only shot 23 for 61 from the field (37.7 per cent), but managed eight for 19 (42 per cent) shots from the three-point line.
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At the Jan. 25 meeting of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Legislative Council, Dental Students’ Society (DSS) President Ryan Siciliano defended the society’s response to sexual assault and harassment allegations in the Faculty of Dentistry. The allegations were detailed in a report by the CBC, which was presented to Council on Jan.16.
Additionally, representatives from the McGill Office of Sustainability presented their Vision 2020 Climate and Sustainability Action Plan, and a member-at-large of the SSMU Accountability Committee outlined the group’s progress. SSMU Vice-President (VP) External Connor Spencer was appointed to the fourth seat designated for executives on the SSMU Board of Directors (BoD), and the SSMU General Assembly (GA) was rescheduled to March 26. The meeting was also the first for newly elected SSMU VP Finance Esteban Herpin.
DSS responds to question regarding sexual assault allegations in faculty
During the question period, Speaker Nicholas Dolmat reintroduced a question submitted by a member of the gallery at a prior council meeting on Jan. 16 to Dentistry Representative Nishath Syed, who was absent at both meetings. The submission questioned how the DSS planned to support its members in light of recent allegations against professors and staff in the faculty. Siciliano, who sat in as a proxy for Syed, read a statement from the DSS executive and answered questions about it.
“I know students very, very well, and we at the DSS, and me as the president of the DSS, and many other students involved don’t feel that we have a fear of harassment, or something more systemic than these allegations made by the two individuals,” Siciliano said during the question period. “At this moment, [the DSS is] satisfied with the outlets that are currently being explored, and we won’t be taking any actions regarding the current allegations.”
Later, Council unanimously voted to pass a motion endorsing the SSMU Survivor Bill of Rights, which enumerates the forms of support that survivors of sexual violence can expect from the organization. During the question period prior to the vote, Sexual Violence Policy Project Coordinator Caitlin Salvino claimed Siciliano’s comments exemplified when advocacy for survivors might be necessary.
“[The policy was created so] that individuals on the SSMU Council could advocate for survivor’s rights at higher levels,” Salvino said. “For example, earlier there was the discussion of the dentistry case, and some of the survivor’s rights in this bill we would argue were violated. So then that would require their representative to advocate on their behalf at higher levels.”
Accountability Committee representative delivers report
The Accountability Committee is a committee of the SSMU Board of Directors (BoD) tasked with creating a standardized method for evaluating the performances of student senators, councillors, directors, and other student officers. Maeve Botham, a member-at-large on the committee, explained that evaluations for officers’ Fall 2017 terms were based on the officers’ attendances and whether their reports were submitted on time. She said that, due to inconsistency in tracking and recording, the committee evaluated only two senators and was not able to assess any directors.
Some members of Council questioned the Committee’s lack of scrutiny.
“My impression from that report is there’s basically no accountability for the Board of Directors,” Spencer said. “Has the Accountability Committee discussed, especially because there are three directors on the Accountability Committee, any options of how to make them accountable?”
McGill Office of Sustainability (MOOS) presents ambitious action plan
MOOS Sustainability Director François Miller and MOOS Communications Officer Toby Davine presented the office’s Vision 2020 Climate and Sustainability Action Plan, which the university recently adopted after a long consultation process that began in Fall 2016. In addition to 22 short-term actions to be completed by the university by 2020, McGill’s plan has two main long-term targets: to attain a platinum sustainability rating by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2040.
“I think if we can achieve [carbon neutrality] here at McGill we can really be an inspiration for Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and then the whole world,” Miller said.
