Daily News

Posted on Jan. 17: Scientist awarded $400,000 grant to study lupus

McMaster University researcher Boris Sakic has been awarded more than $400,000 Cdn to study mechanisms of brain damage in an autoimmune disease. The assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural neurosciences along with four American researchers have been awarded separate grants to study this aspect of an autoimmune disease known as systemic lupus erythematosus. The grants were from the U.S. National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Lupus is a disease which can be fatal, and in which immune cells become confused. Instead of protecting the body by attacking bacteria or virus, they start to attack the body's own cells by producing proteins called autoantibodies. When the brain becomes the target this often results in psychosis, depression and memory loss.

Posted on Jan. 16: Personal values bode well in business

Hubert Saint-Onge sounds more like a self-help guru than a leader of the information revolution. Where others making presentations at this week's McMaster World Congress on Intellectual Capital, Innovation and E-Business filled the heads of their audiences with talks on integrated concepts for measuring the performance of e-services and how to build knowledge-based cultures in organizations, Saint-Onge speaks of values, "your sacred self" and other words which seem to have vanished from the business dictionary. Speaking as part of a lunch-time panel at the conference's opening session yesterday, the University of Waterloo's executive-in-residence told participants that despite the massive changes information technology has brought to the world, there's still room for individual values, still chances for individuals to make a difference. Click here to read more. (The Hamilton Spectator, Jan. 16, 2003)

Posted on Jan. 15: McMaster turns off cheating, by turning it in

It's as old as the hills, maybe even older than this clichi. Plagiarism. Whether it's stealing ideas, facts or passages, academic dishonesty is not new to universities. But since the advent of the internet, cases of it have grown. At McMaster, there were 173 cases in the 2001-02 academic year 90 more than the year before. Offences ranged from plagiarism from the internet to copying of assignments. "Cheating is not new," says Andrea Thyret-Kidd, McMaster's academic integrity officer. "However, with the Internet now in existence, so many students have taken the old way of cheating and are now using this new technology." McMaster is battling back with Turnitin.com, a computer software package designed to reveal plagiarism. Turnitin.com is used by a number of Canadian universities, including the University of Western Ontario, the University of Toronto and York University. "Cheating is a universal problem that universities are responding to," Thyret-Kidd says.

Posted on Jan. 15: Student demand high for McMaster

The numbers are in and the message is clear. McMaster is a popular place with students seeking entrance into university. So popular, in fact, that about 39,000 applications from Ontario high school students have been received for approximately 3,900 spaces McMaster will be able to offer this year. And as Wednesday's midnight application deadline neared, this number out of the Ontario Universities Application Centre (OUAC) continued to grow. McMaster signed an enrolment target agreement with the government, which means the University has agreed to admit approximately 3,900 Ontario high school students. The total level one class target is about 4,900.