Daily News

Posted on March 26: $25,000 grand prize nurtures student entrepreneurs

Life's been fun and games for Chris Benoit since winning the $25,000 CampusIncubator award. The third-year McMaster software engineering student, with Peter Hitchcock, third-year McMaster arts and science student, and Mark Mikulec, a computer science student from Brock University, are recipients of the 2003 CampusIncubator Business Plan Challenge for Iron Fusion, an entertainment software development company. "We supply the core software component of a computer game, which makes it possible for others to use this technology to make their own games," Benoit explains. "The whole idea about this invention is that we are making it easier for others to create games. People have great ideas they just don't know how to separate the content of the game from the code." The $25,000 prize is welcome support for the start-up company, Benoit says. "The money will really help us make a lot of progress. Within the next year or two we hope to have the engine complete and by the end of 2004 we hope to complete a game called Dog Fight, which is a tactical space combat game." The software also enables urban visualization, he says. "Instead of using blueprints or schematics, you can use this software to get a 3-D model in its own virtual world, including wind and traffic." "This is something we have all been interested in for a long time," says Benoit, who with Hitchcock and Mikulec leads a nine-member team. "We have learned a lot from what we have seen and feel we can make it even better. Games are still so new. They have really only been around for 20 years." But, he adds, it is a growing industry, noting in 2003, it made about $7.7 billion in U.S. sales. "It rivals the music and movie industries. It's an exciting time to be in it because there are so many exciting things happening."

Posted on March 25: An economist’s view: beauty is a labour market matter

If you look good, will you get ahead? American economist Daniel S. Hamermesh will talk about the relationship between physical appearance and labour market success in a public lecture titled The Economics of Beauty. Hamermesh, a 2003 Hooker Visiting Professor in Economics, will deliver the lecture on Thursday, March 27, at 3 p.m. in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Business building Room 505. Hamermesh is the Edward Everett Hale Centennial Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at Princeton and Michigan State and has held visiting professorships at universities in the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia. His research, published in more than 70 papers in scholarly journals, has concentrated on labor demand, time use, social programs and unusual applications of labor economics to suicide, sleep and beauty. A recent research article is titled Dress for Success: Does Primping Pay? Hamermesh is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, program director at the Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA), and past president of the Society of Labor Economists and of the Midwest Economics Association. His books include Labor Demand and The Economics of Work and Pay, a labour economics textbook. His latest book, published this year, is Economics Is Everywhere, a series of 400 vignettes designed to illustrate the ubiquity of economics in everyday life and how the simple tools in a microeconomics principles class can be used. Hamermesh is widely quoted in newspapers and magazines and has appeared on such television programs as Good Morning, America, and the McNeil-Lehrer Report. Go to http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Hamermesh/ for more information about Hamermesh. The lecture is co-sponsored by the McMaster Economics Society.

Posted on March 24: Researchers help develop intelligent lumber mills

McMaster is joining forces with Precarn Inc., Forintek Canada, Tembec and Comact Optimisation to develop an Intelligent Mill Wide Control System for the lumber industry. The official announcement was made Feb. 20 during the Canadian Lumbermen's Association Annual Convention in Montreal. Over the next three years the partners will contribute $2.7 million to create the Smart Mill Assistant (SMA). This advanced process control system will allow lumber manufacturers to monitor and control all independent production steps in an integrated fashion. The Smart Mill Assistant Project is being led by Forintek, which is Canada's National Wood Products Research Institute, in close collaboration with key specialists and mill staff from Tembec, Comact Optimisation and McMaster University (Dr. J. MacGregor and Dr. T. Kourti, MACC, Dept. Chem. Eng.) Theodora Kourti is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering