Skip to main content
Skip to main content
Glendon Campus Alumni Research Giving to York Media Careers International York U Lions Accessibility
Future Students Current Students Faculty and Staff
Faculties Libraries York U Organization Directory Site Index Campus Maps

Monthly Archives: November 2007

Prof Amir Asif: Reaching out to industry

Posted on by

In the December 2007 issue of YorkU Magazine there’s and article about York faculty reaching out and making connections (on page 26). This article profiles Prof. Asif’s work on designing better cancer treatments using signals from a tiny homing beacon to focus radiation treatments on a specific part of the body. He is collaborating on this project with IBM and sanofi pasteur.

According to Stan Shapson, York VP Research and Innovation:

Governments do a lot of investment in basic reserach, which is critically important in the long term. But government also want to look at opportunities for earlier returns on investment. That’s why it’s important for a university to take applied research and, in some cases, graduate training and experience out into the local community.”

Great article.  Check it out.

Oh the horror!

Posted on by

Coding Horror is one of my favourite computer science blogs, always full of good information and lots of fun to boot.

Yesterday’s post What’s in a Project Name? is all about the weird and silly names big software houses give to their “top secret” projects.

Some rules of the game:

We’ve come up with the following loose guidelines for project naming:

  • We prefer one word names.
  • They should be relatively easy to pronounce and easy to spell.
  • They have to be client friendly.
  • They should be globally unique across the company. No duplicates.
  • We need a reasonable number of items in the set to choose from, in A-Z order.

Ok, so not so weird and silly. Anyways, check out the blog, it’s a lot of fun.

Prof. Quine in the news again!

Posted on by

From Y-File:

Instead of counting on polluters to report their own emissions, York space scientist Brendan Quine has developed a sneaky pollution spy – a tiny gadget that works in space, reported The Globe and Mail Nov. 3. Called the Argus microspectrometer, it picks up on the chemical signatures of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that cause global warming. It will launch into orbit next month on board a microsatellite test-driving tiny instruments. Most tools sent into space cost millions and wind up as nothing more than pollution themselves: giant pieces of obsolete trash orbiting the Earth. Argus costs about $75,000 and can fit in the palm of your hand – making it a cost-effective example of sustainable space instrumentation.