Daily News

Posted on Jan. 8: Gift fosters generation of innovation

A McMaster alumnus and successful entrepreneur hopes to foster another generation of innovation with a $1-million gift to support the creation of a new research chair in engineering entrepreneurship and innovation. The gift from Woodstock businessman Walter G. Booth will be used to establish the Walter G. Booth Chair in Engineering Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Faculty of Engineering. The gift was celebrated today with an announcement at the University. Booth is Chairman and CEO of the Timberland Group, a group of three companies that specialize in winching and hoisting products that are sold around the world. Booth graduated from McMaster with a bachelor of engineering in mechanical engineering in 1962 and obtained his master's in engineering in 1965. Booth said this gift is his way of saying thanks to two McMaster professors former engineering dean Jack Hodgins and Jim Siddall and honouring their willingness to be academic leaders of innovation. Booth said both men were instrumental in his academic life and pursuit of a meaningful and successful career as an entrepreneur. "Both men took a chance on me at crucial times in my life and entrepreneurship and innovation are about taking chances and taking risks," he said. "I see the need in our own organization and in Canada for this type of engineering person who has an entrepreneurial bent and strength."

Posted on Dec. 7: Museum of Art presents photographer Gu Xiong

The merging of cultures, blurring of borders and camouflaging of history are explored in the critical and often humorous photographs of Gu Xiong, presented by the McMaster Museum of Art, Jan. 5 to Feb. 23. Entitled FLOW, the exhibit is curated by artist/curator Andrew Hunter. The presentation includes a series of Xiong's photographs taken over the past two years in China and across Canada, including such images as Starbucks in the Forbidden City, Mount Rushmore in Chongquing, Bruce Lee trinkets and portraits of Mao and Audrey Hepburn side by side in a funeral supply storefront. The series provides a contemporary view of the dialogue between two cultural forces.

Posted on Jan. 6: Amazing students, amazing stories: Roxanne Lai

Three inspiring and outstanding McMaster students were featured in the December issue of the McMaster Review. This is the third profile in a three-part series featured on the Daily News. It is an example of how students make the world a better place and who serve as shining examples of students as socially responsible citizens. These are stories of inspiration, stories that give us all a reason to smile. Roxanne Lai Age: 21 Academic Program: Honours Linguistics Career goal: Physician for Disadvantaged Populations A piano, a French horn, a guitar, some drums and whatever other instruments she could get her hands on. Every month for a year Roxanne Lai would gather up instruments from people and places she knew and bring them to a local church basement so her clients could enjoy a monthly musical performance. Her "clients" were the individuals she worked with as a volunteer for the Hamilton Program for Schizophrenics. Anywhere from five to 12 people from the program participated in the church social event. Some played an instrument. Others didn't. No matter, really. They were there to have fun, to socialize.

Posted on Jan. 3: Amazing students, amazing stories: Dan Olsen

Three inspiring and outstanding McMaster students were featured in the December issue of the McMaster Review. This is the second of three profiles we will feature on the Daily News. It is an example of how students make the world a better place and who serve as shining examples of students as socially responsible citizens. These are stories of inspiration, stories that give us all a reason to smile. Dan Olsen Age: 23 Academic Program: Civil Engineering & Management Career goal: International Work (Sustainability) Dan Olsen fingers a handful of photographs that have been sent to him from rural India. In one, a mother and her daughter stare wide-eyed at the camera from deep inside the shadows of their straw-roofed house. In another, the stark living conditions of the villagers in Tamal Nadu are revealed. The pictures speak of hope and desperation. They are images that Dan Olsen has come to know and experience first hand. The fourth-year civil engineering and management student has travelled to Bolivia, Nicaragua and Mexico for the past three summers to help the underprivileged in orphanages and assist in the building of new homes.

Posted on Jan. 2: Surgical therapy not safe for all

McMaster professor of medicine Deborah Cook, and other Canadian researchers, have shown a costly diagnostic and treatment tool, assumed to raise survival rates in many hospital settings, provided no benefit to patients facing major non-cardiac surgery. Dean Sandham of the University of Calgary's medical school, led the team that showed using pulmonary-artery catheters in older patients about to undergo such surgery does not raise their likelihood of surviving and, in fact, raises their risk of a life-threatening blood clot in the lungs. "We can't afford to use our health-care resources on things that aren't helpful," he said. The findings of their 10-year study, published in today's New England Journal of Medicine, contradict what, for some time, was considered a given: that high-risk surgery patients were less likely to die if a pulmonary-artery catheter was inserted before they went under the knife. "This will have a very large impact on patient care," said Cook, chair of the Canadian critical care clinical trials group. "This is truly a landmark study. It shows clearly that, in the population tested ..., there's no evidence of any benefit of having the pulmonary-artery catheter." Click here for the story in The Toronto Star.