John Lorinc

Serious Play: Video game studies conference to draw global scholars to U of T Mississauga

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 19:12:17 +0000

Serious Play: Video game studies conference to draw global scholars to U of T Mississauga

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 08/09/2024 - 15:12

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(photo by NoSystem images/Getty Images)

John Lorinc

Topic

Our Community

U of T Mississauga

Video Games

Subheadline

The 18th annual Serious Play conference will focus on themes such as game development, the use of games in education and the socio-cultural role of games

More than 300 scholars from around the world are set to converge at the University of Toronto Mississauga to dig into to the multi-faceted world of video games.

The 18th annual Serious Play conference, scheduled for Aug. 12 to 14, will focus on themes such as game development, the use of games in education and the socio-cultural role of games in a world that increasingly reflects this discipline's choose-your-own adventure ethos.

"Games are uniquely relevant to our moment in history – and it has nothing to do with their economic impact or the popularity of video games," says Serious Play executive director Paul Darvasi, who lectures at U of T’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education on the topics of games and learning.

"[It has] more to do with us living in a participatory dynamic culture. [Games] are arguably the art form of the 21st century."

A long-time attendee, Darvasi and his business partner Elisa Navarro took over the conference late last year. They decided to bring the conference to Greater Toronto to take advantage of U of T Mississauga's new game studies program, the campus's extensive Syd Bolton video game collection and the energy emanating from the region's lively game development community.

Alexandra Gillespie, U of T vice-president and principal of U of T Mississauga, will deliver opening remarks as well as host a welcome reception for conference participants, including several U of T experts.

While the global gaming industry grosses more than the music and film sectors combined, the Serious Play participants will be discussing other facets of gaming – namely the many ways it can be used to improve education, training and other types of learning.

"Play is merely the way that nature incentivizes our species to learn," Darvasi says. "Children learn through play. It's a hyper-motivated way for them to engage in practices that are going to prepare them for participation in society."

Culturally, he adds, games encompass virtually all the other art forms, including writing, dance, theatre, photography, film, sculpture and painting. Darvasi, who co-owns developer Gold Bug Interactive, describes video games as "this grand opera of human endeavour, which is weird to think about because it gets a bad name that's obscuring its more potent cultural value."

Lawrence Switzky, an associate professor in U of T Mississauga’s department of English and drama who has been a driving force behind the games studies program, uses game development as a way of teaching students about narrative and character, among other themes.

"This conference is a great fit for us," Switzky says. "The largest games and learning conference on the continent belongs at UTM because we have the talent and resources to accommodate it, and because we're establishing ourselves as a leader in the field with the Syd Bolton and Electric Playground collections, our game studies minor and all our programming."

The conference will include sessions on games and history education – including a session on “playing the past” with U of T doctoral candidate Ariana Ellis, who helped organize U of T Mississauga’s Day of Play event last year – along with virtual reality development, cybersecurity and gamification of climate action for K-12 students. Other sessions will tackle topics ranging from higher education to health care and culture and society.

Darvasi notes that Girls Who Game, a non-profit focused on gender and gaming backed by Dell, Microsoft and Intel, will collaborate on a session on esports competitive gaming, which he says has a reputation for being a very male-centric environment.

"We're really highlighting the positive participation of women in esports, and we're going to be demonstrating that," he says.

Some game development sessions will focus on buzzy technologies like generative AI and large-language models. For example, some developers are using ChatGPT to build highly complex scenario-based games in which the players participate through prompts to navigate the story.

Darvasi says it's only a matter of time before those games acquire visual elements also generated by algorithmic and user prompts.

"That's the next step for sure."

U of T Mississauga launches game studies program

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 13:58:54 +0000

U of T Mississauga launches game studies program

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 11/03/2023 - 09:58

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(photo by Westend61/Getty Images)

John Lorinc

Topic

Our Community

U of T Mississauga

Subheadline

The game studies minor focuses on both the creation and analysis of games

The University of Toronto Mississauga is launching a game studies program that will introduce students to the world of games from cultural, artistic and technological perspectives – and prepare them for graduate studies and careers in the burgeoning gaming industry.

From narrative, design and business to the methodologies of testing, role-playing and the use of video game engines, the new game studies minor cuts across a wide range of disciplines.

The program is being offered by the department of English and drama in collaboration with the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology

"Play and games are as old as recorded history," says Christopher Young, head of collections and digital scholarship at the U of T Mississauga Library. "Some of the oldest artifacts and objects [are] dice or cuneiform tablets with rules on them. That speaks to how universal play is and formalizing it into a game that's based on the cultural and political history of the people at that time."

The launch of the game studies minor is the latest example of U of T Mississauga’s growing presence and influence in game studies scholarship and research. In 2020, the university acquired the Syd Bolton Collection, a comprehensive academic collection of video games comprising over 14,000 titles. Earlier this week, U of T Mississauga also acquired access to the archives of Electric Playground, a long-running Canadian video game show.

The two collections, cataloguing of which is almost complete, serve as a research tool.

An important theme that runs through the learning is that play, which is often seen as an activity for children, actually and appropriately intersects with life in all its ages and stages. "To my mind, play is not preparation for what you do later on in life," says Lawrence Switzky, an associate professor in the department of English and drama.

“Play transforms us and it transforms the spaces we move in,” adds Young, who is also the chief archivist of the Syd Bolton and Electric Playgrounds collections.

The Student Centre at U of T Mississauga will see such a transformation this Thursday, Nov. 9, converting into a giant play zone as part of a Day of Play that marks the launch of the game studies program.

From giant Jenga blocks and an inflatable obstacle course to a huge hopscotch court, a storytelling hub and of course, video games, the Day of Play will offer a range of interactive and playful activities for students, faculty and members of the public. The event will be followed by a symposium on the role of games in our society.

Switzky says the goal is to "establish and promote UTM as a place where game studies, teaching and research and experiential education [happen] by making the campus come alive with games."

For Young, infusing play and playfulness into campus life will offer a respite from the usual.

"If this can make people not think about what's happening for five minutes and bring a playful experience that makes their day better, I'm all for that," says Young. "Hopefully, that is the experience people will get from engaging in some of these different spaces."

The Game Studies launch and symposium takes place in the U of T Mississauga Library and online on Nov. 9, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Students, faculty and members of the public can register for the free event here.

For a full list of Day of Play activities, please visit the info page.

So you want to build a startup? Canada’s top entrepreneurs offer U of T 10 tips

ullahnor — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 13:22:06 +0000

So you want to build a startup? Canada’s top entrepreneurs offer U of T 10 tips

ullahnor Tue, 03/28/2017 - 09:22

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Among U of T’s better known startups are Nanoleaf, Nymi, Arda Power, Whirlscape and Northern Biologics. Nanoleaf's Gimmy Chu co-founded the company, which develops the world's most energy efficient light bulb (photo by Johnny Guatto).

Author legacy

Marcia Kaye, John Lorinc and Scott Anderson

Topic

Creative Destruction Lab

Rotman

Impact Centre

Only half of new Canadian companies survive past five years, and only a tiny percentage become global success stories. Tiff Macklem, the dean of U of T's Rotman School of Management, has been thinking and writing a lot about how to improve these odds. He doesn’t believe Canadians are lacking in education or innovative ideas. But he does think we have a problem converting ideas into products and services that people – lots of people – want. Where is Canada’s answer to Spotify (first heard in Sweden) or Skype (founded in Estonia)?

“The crux of our problem is commercialization and scale,” Macklem says.

In his view, what Canadian startups are missing is great business judgment, which, as he points out, is not easy to acquire: “A new venture cannot simply go downtown and purchase a unit of business judgment,” he says.

To address this, the U of T Entrepreneurship network of incubators, accelerators and programs, including at Rotman, are connecting fledgling companies with expert mentors to provide the kind of hands-on advice they’ll need to get through those perilous first few years – and, with any luck, eventually compete on a global scale.

Here are facts about U of T startups:

Between 2013 and 2015, researchers at U of T and its partner hospitals created an average of one new invention every 21 hours and filed a new patent application an average of about once every five days
About three quarters of U of T inventions are co-developed by students or post-docs
U of T offers 68 courses covering various aspects of entrepreneurship.

For Entrepreneurship @ U of T Week, some of Canada’s top entrepreneurs share lessons they learned on the path to success.

Learn more about Entrepreneurship@UofT Week

No. 1: “As an entrepreneur, the best product you can build is yourself”

Allen Lau is the CEO and co-founder of Wattpad, an online story-sharing community with 45 million monthly users.

In the early days of Wattpad, U of T alumnus Lau had everything under control. He and co-founder Ivan Yuen had come up with the idea, developed the technology and written the code. They now waited for readers and writers to flock to it and advertising revenue to pour in. It took a while.

That first year, 2006, Wattpad had barely a thousand users. Over the next couple of years, however, interest grew and so did the company. But Lau discovered that while he was proficient on the technology side, in other skills – marketing and publicity, raising capital – he was less competent.

Or as he puts it: “I was horrible! I realized that if I wanted to scale the company, I had to scale myself,” in other words, quickly acquire new skills with each phase of the company’s growth. When Wattpad needed more employees, Lau suddenly had to learn through trial and error how to hire people, then how to delegate. When the company required more than one engineer or marketer, he needed to hire team leaders, which meant he had to become a leader himself.

“And that’s a very different skill set.”

Approaching investors required different expertise again. “When I approached 40 potential investors, 39 said no,” Lau says. “It wasn’t because the idea wasn’t good but because I failed to communicate it.” With practice, his pitch kept improving. As Wattpad grew, Lau’s job shifted to communications and strategy. Now with a staff of 130 and with 45 million monthly users (even CanLit star Margaret Atwood has published new work on the site), Wattpad has moved toward becoming a global entertainment company, partnering to co-produce original Wattpad stories for movies and TV.

“It’s almost like every year I’m getting a new job, which can be very daunting if you’re not good at self-learning,” Lau says.

No. 2: “Find a business idea you feel passionate about”

Cynthia Goh is the academic director of University of Toronto Entrepreneurship and the founding director of U of T’s Impact Centre, a business incubator.

A serial entrepreneur herself, she has assisted at the births of 136 startups. From her perspective as an entrepreneur and a mentor, Goh looks for a certain special enthusiasm as a major predictor of success.

“The most important thing is passion. Not for making money, but for the idea.”

No matter how awesome your business concept, she says, if you don’t believe in it strongly enough, you’ll give up at the first obstacle.

“Being an entrepreneur can be a tough road so you’ve got to be fuelled by passion.”

She cites a recent U of T success story. Adrenalease sells performance clothing that realigns posture, and Goh credits the infectious enthusiasm of founder and president Noureddin Chahrour, a kinesiology grad, for the company’s early achievements.

“He is obsessed with muscles, and how they function,” Goh says.

In 2015, that passion helped persuade four of the five venture capitalists on CBC-TV’s Dragons’ Den to offer him deals.

No. 3: “Get an advanced degree, and set audacious goals”

Kristjan Sigurdson is the associate director of the Creative Destruction Lab and a PhD candidate at the Rotman School of Management. Launched in 2012, the Creative Destruction Lab’s nine-month program pairs startup founders with experienced technology entrepreneurs and investors. The program, based at Rotman, is designed for early-stage, science-based technology companies.

Having an advanced degree and setting audacious goals for your startup gives you three important advantages, says Sigurdson. First, your deep expertise gives you the credibility to go into a meeting with investors, teach them something about the future of science or technology and convince them that you can meet your goals.

“If you do that successfully, they’re probably going to want to take another meeting with you.”

Second, it enables you to hire others with deep expertise in your field. If you have an MBA but no experience in quantum physics, it’s difficult to recruit someone with a PhD in quantum physics, Sigurdson observes.

“It’s easier to learn how to run a company than it is to become a leading expert in a field.”

Third, when your company trajectory invariably changes – because of an obstacle you couldn’t anticipate – it’s easier to adapt if you have a deep well of knowledge to draw from and a network
of like-minded experts to help you. Sigurdson offers the example of a founder working with the Creative Destruction Lab whose audacious goal is to build a next-generation quantum computer that uses off-the-shelf components and works at room temperature (most quantum computing research is conducted at low temperatures). The founder has a PhD in quantum information theory and a large network of collaborators in multiple countries.

“If he just had an undergraduate degree in physics and a faculty adviser – or an MBA and a business plan – he wouldn’t have lasted long in a room with investors,” says Sigurdson. “And the audacious goal will help him to attract the top-notch talent he’ll need to succeed.”

No. 4: “Accept that sometimes you’ll be unlucky, and move on”

Daniel Debow is a serial entrepreneur and an adjunct professor of law at U of T. A member of the teams that founded Workbrain and Rypple, Debow and his partners sold Rypple to Salesforce in 2012, but Debow stayed on for three years to oversee emerging technologies. He is currently building a new startup, Helpful.com.

“One of the most important lessons I learned,” says Debow, “was from David Ossip (the founder of Workbrain and a U of T Scarborough alumnus).

It was the power of the word ‘unlucky.’”

Early in his career, Debow collaborated with Ossip on Workbrain – a workforce-management software system for companies with a large number of hourly staff.

After 18 months of development, they’d finally landed British Airways as a customer and Ossip was planning to attend an airline conference in order to pitch new clients. But the day he was scheduled to travel was Sept. 11, 2001. He never got to the conference, and the terrorist attacks sent the aviation industry into a years-long tailspin. No one was buying new systems.

“David just said, ‘unlucky,’ and we went off and built another plan.” The point, Debow says, is that entrepreneurs like Ossip don’t dwell on unforeseen disasters, nor do they spend time obsessing
over what went wrong.

“I learned you have to take the world as it is, not as you wish it to be,” reflects Debow. “Stuff happens. You have to respond.”

No. 5: “Spend at least one day a week cultivating relationships with investors”

Anthony Lacavera is the founder and chairman of the Globalive Group. He also founded Wind Mobile, which was sold in 2015 to Shaw Communications for $1.6 billion.

“It doesn’t matter how good your technology or your team is,” says Lacavera, a U of T alumnus who in the past 20 years has founded a dozen startups – mostly in telecommunications and software.

“If you have no capital, someone with technology or a team that’s not as good but who has capital will beat you 10 times out of 10.”

Lacavera advises entrepreneurs to continually build relationships with investors by talking to their existing ones, asking for referrals to new ones and cold-calling potential ones. He’s done that for years, and that’s why he was able to raise $700 million to start Wind Mobile in 2008.

“Wind succeeded not because I’m a great salesperson or had an unbelievable business. It’s because I was able to raise the capital,” he says.

No. 6: “Test out your ideas in the real world. Don’t get caught in analysis paralysis”

Toni Allen is the founding partner of R3VE Business Design Inc., which specializes in user experience and business innovation.

For entrepreneurs pushing themselves to create a unique product, there’s always a powerful temptation to devote too much time to perfecting a solution, and not enough to getting it out the door.

The lesson, according to Allen, a U of T Mississauga alumna: “You lose opportunities. You have to get out there and test your ideas.”

Allen’s five-year-old firm, R3VE, provides user experience, service design and business model innovation to large corporate clients, including banks. Early on, Allen recounts, she was developing a product geared at a specific retailer. Allen had identified the right person to pitch and had created a proposal but waited too long before making her approach, and the ship sailed.

This habit of mind – overplanning – came from her days working in a large bank where she’d sought to convince her colleagues that they needed to focus on the way design and technology overlap in the delivery of financial services. In that setting, she recalls, “I didn’t know how to pitch ideas and make a business case.”

Those early instincts about the opportunity for leveraging design thinking and user experience principles in the financial services market proved to be correct and provided the impetus for R3VE. But her insights only became a viable business when she got herself in front of customers: “When you have an idea, you need to try it and test it. Don’t get caught in analysis paralysis.”

No. 7: “Choose your business partners carefully and communicate openly and honestly with each other”

Sonya Amin is the director, client services, of AXS Studio, which she co-founded in 2004 with fellow U of T alumni Eddy Xuan and Jason Sharpe. With 15 employees at its downtown Toronto office, the company creates visuals for teaching science and life sciences, including illustrations, animations and interactive applications.

In hindsight, says Amin, she was lucky. She and her two business partners share the same goals for AXS Studio and their individual strengths complement each other. But they didn’t spend much time planning it that way, she admits.

“We went into it as a dream that three classmates shared when they were in school.”

What they did have was trust in each other – crucial for a relationship that, like a marriage, will be sorely tested at times, says Amin.

“If you don’t trust your partner with your life then you shouldn’t be getting into business together.”

Amin says the ability to speak openly and honestly with each other is paramount – a lesson the AXS Studio founders learned when it became apparent that they were not aligned on how they
defined growth for their company.

“We had to have a candid conversation and managed to get to the heart of the matter: AXS’s goals needed to be aligned with our rarely discussed personal goals.”

This realization prompted the partners to emphasize open and clear communication with their employees as well.

“When we hear of anyone talking vaguely, or if we suspect that people might be working at cross-purposes, we stop and look at it more closely,” she says. “This has helped in lots of different
areas from human resources to day-today production.”

Amin credits the U of T biomedical communications program with enabling students like her with an aptitude for both art and science, to make a career out of their dual loves. The program is
also very practical, she says, adding that staff recommended clients when she and her co-founders launched AXS Studio.

“They’re amazingly supportive of their students.”

No. 8: “Don’t mistake expressions of interest from potential customers as evidence that you’ve tapped into a viable market”

Karl Martin is the co-founder and chief technology officer for Nymi, a tech company that allows users to gain access to their devices by wearing a wristband that detects their unique heart pattern.

Throughout 2015, executives for Nymi, a Toronto firm that’s developed a wristband security device, were doing the rounds, talking up their technology to potential customers. At meeting after meeting, recalls Martin, they’d hear the same thing: we love your technology, which allows wearers to log onto a range of computer devices by detecting unique heartbeat patterns, but we need more features and capabilities.

As the U of T alumnus recounts, he and his team were energized by all that interest, but they had big challenges taking the next step, which was to really figure out how to hone the positioning of their device to fit the needs of specific users.

Indeed, says Martin, it was only after Nymi started getting orders from pharmaceutical manufacturers that he realized what the stumbling block had been. In ordinary office settings, there was no way to compel employees to wear the wristbands. But in the controlled environment of a manufacturing facility, where workers are required to wear sterile and protective gear, that problem evaporated. And so did the sales roadblock.

The lesson, Martin observes, is that many entrepreneurs whose startups are transitioning from research and development to marketing glom onto the slightest spark of interest from potential customers as evidence that the firm is ready to lift off.

“Recognize that you usually think you have a product-market fit before you actually do.”

No. 9: “Be prepared to act quickly when faced with a big challenge”

Kim Shannon is the founder, president and co-chief investment officer of Sionna Investment Managers, which has assets of $5 billion.

As Sionna Investment Managers has grown over the past 15 years, says Shannon, so has her need to be adaptable.

“You have to keep nimble as issues emerge because you never know what’s around the corner.”

One of the most significant challenges happened when her biggest client – a fund company representing 90 per cent of her business – asked her to lower her rates for them.

“We fired them,” Shannon says. A risky move indeed, but she knew that working with a difficult or controlling client didn’t fit with her long-term goals for the company.

It was a tense time but a brief one. Soon other interested companies began approaching Sionna.

“Before, those companies hadn’t wanted to be secondary clients,” she explains. “But once the big one was gone, we had people coming to us. They actually admired us for what we’d done.”

Sionna quickly diversified its client base and expanded the business. Ultimately, Shannon mended relations with the big client, and she now includes the company’s stock in Sionna’s portfolios.

While she was a student at U of T, Shannon served on student council, launched a women’s newspaper and started a peer-counselling program. She credits her volunteer activities for building
her skills in organization, leadership and collaboration.

“If you have volunteer experience, your career progress will be much faster,” she says. “Many successful people I see in business were once student leaders.”

No. 10: “Skate to where the puck is going”

Michael Serbinis is the the founder and CEO of League, a digital health insurance platform. Previously, he co-founded Kobo, the e-reader service.

When Serbinis thinks about the long-term goals for his company, he envisions a trillion-dollar global market.

“Our goal,” he says “is to disrupt an age-old insurance industry with a new philosophy focused on empowering people to be healthy every day.”

As the head of a startup, though, Serbinis needs to balance his long-term ambitions with the smaller challenges he and his team face every day. As with all startups, League staff are building product, hiring and firing staff, landing the next customer, making payroll, meeting investors and more.

“It never stops, and it is pretty easy to get caught up in the short term,” says Serbinis.

“But you have to keep your eye on the prize. I do that by having very clear long-term objectives that I repeat over and over to myself and the team. We regularly review our plans and brainstorm: What’s it going to take to meet our long-term goals? What are the risks, and what are the opportunities?”

Serbinis says it’s important to make bets on the future.

“As CEO, you cannot be consumed by today. You need to be putting in place the infrastructure that is going to help you scale. You need to be setting up enablers that will help your team three, six, nine and 12 months out.”

Reflecting on his time as a grad student at U of T, Serbinis says his supervisor was Joseph Paradi, an engineer-turned-entrepreneur who built Dataline, one of the first digital stock-quote platforms in Canada.

“He was my mentor at a time when I had no money, and I didn’t know what being an entrepreneur meant or how to lead or manage teams,” says Serbinis. “He inspired me, and we still keep in touch to this day.”

Watch for this story and others about entrepreneurship in the Spring 2017 issue of U of T Magazine.

(Daniel Debow's photo was taken by Jordana Huber, Kim Shannon's photo was taken by Gordon Hawkins and Michael Serbinis photo courtesy of the League)

U of T grads who co-founded booming startup Exact Media named to "Forbes 30 Under 30 List"

ullahnor — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 19:31:08 +0000

U of T grads who co-founded booming startup Exact Media named to "Forbes 30 Under 30 List"

ullahnor Thu, 01/12/2017 - 14:31

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(photo courtesy of Exact Media)

Ken McGuffin

John Lorinc

Author legacy

Ken McGuffin and John Lorinc

Topic

City & Culture

Entrepreneurship

Startup

Rotman School of Management

Forbes

Subheadline

Other U of T alums on the list: Shopify's Satish Kanwar, Massdrop's Steve El-Hage, ROSS Intelligence's Jimoh Ovbiagele, and Cover's Ben Aneesh.

The co-founders of Toronto-based startup Exact Media, which has been described as the Airbnb of marketing, have been named to the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 list of the young innovators and “change-makers” who are redefining industries from marketing to healthcare and education.

They are among several U of T alumni that made it to the list this year. U of T alumni were recognized in categories like consumer technology, law & policy, marketing and advertising, and retail and ecommerce.

Daniel Rodic and Elena Sahakyan are two of the four co-founders of Exact Media, a Toronto-based e-commerce sampling and coupon company. The two, who are graduates of U of T's Rotman Commerce program, were cited in the marketing and advertising category.

Exact Media buys excess space inside parcels that are being delivered to people who have made online purchases. The company then tucks samples of branded products into those spots. Brands pay Exact to find these spaces so that people purchasing towels online may receive a sample of Tide detergent or someone buying a swimsuit may get a bottle of Olay sunscreen.

The company's investors include Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, and it serves clients like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, PepsiCo, L'Oréal, Pfizer and Mondelez,

In a recent profile in the Winter 2017 issue of U of T Magazine, Rodic says his career path was changed when he was accepted into The Next 36, an intensive entrepreneurship program co-founded by Ajay Agrawal, the Peter Munk Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management.

“Through The Next 36, I got funding to start my first business, and that’s what pushed me toward a more entrepreneurial path,” Rodic says.

Rodic says the company grew out of discussions with an executive at Beyond the Rack, an online clothing retailer. The retailer was looking at ways of providing its customers with cosmetics samples. Together, they realized they could slip the samples into Beyond the Rack’s parcels.

With strong financial backing, Exact Media is planning to expand beyond North America within the next 18 months, possibly targeting the United Kingdom, Western Europe or Asia.

M is for Mystery: The secret science of World War II

lavende4 — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 18:01:08 +0000

M is for Mystery: The secret science of World War II

lavende4 Mon, 06/20/2016 - 14:01

Cutline

Wilbur Franks and an anti-gravity suit (University of Toronto Archives / Jack Marshall Photography)

John Lorinc

Author legacy

John Lorinc

Topic

Our Community

Faculty of Medicine

World War II

"What makes for a really good mystery? It isn’t just an interesting question or sparring with a particularly evil villain. A good mystery is born from the tension that builds as our hero pursues the truth, often against the odds."

So begins "Dial M for Medicine", Dean Trevor Young's introduction to the Summer 2016 issue of the award-winning Faculty of Medicine Magazine, which this issue focuses on medical mysteries. Over the next few weeks, U of T News will reprint some of the stories from that issue. Our first mystery, the Secret Science of World War II, is solved by freelance writer and U of T science graduate John Lorinc.

In August 1941, moviegoers flocked to the latest Hollywood war flick called Dive Bomber, which hit theatres months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The film tells the tale of two men — a Harvard-educated doctor and a seasoned pilot — searching for solutions to the altitude sickness and blackouts that afflicted pilots on dangerous missions. The unlikely pair defied the skeptics and experimented with a “pneumatic belt” meant to keep blood flowing to the brain. The film, audiences were told, was dedicated to the cause of “aviation medicine.”

Toronto audiences likely had no idea that the story was an almost eerily accurate retelling of the pioneering, super-secret aviation medicine experiments carried out by University of Toronto researchers at a Royal Canadian Air Force facility on Avenue Road north of Eglinton.

The facility was located on the grounds of the former Eglinton Hunt Club, which the RCAF bought for $50,000 to run its training programs. Inside, Professor Wilbur Franks (BA ’24, MB ’28), a U of T cancer researcher working for Sir Frederick Banting (MB ’16, MD ’22), used a human centrifuge to test the anti-gravity suit he’d designed for air force pilots prone to blacking out from intense g-force pressure created by tight turns and nose dives.

The suit, which he personally tested at Camp Borden, west of Barrie, Ontario, and later at the Farnborough Airfield in England, was the first of its kind and established Franks as a pivotal figure in the history of aviation medicine. But its development exacted a heavy toll: Banting, one half of the team credited with the discovery of insulin, was killed in a crash in early 1941 in Newfoundland while heading to England to test Franks’ invention.

So what exactly does an anti-gravity suit protect the body from? When someone is sitting at ground level, not moving, the earth’s gravitational field exerts what’s called a 1-g force, equivalent to the weight of that person. But when the same individual is being whipped around on a tight curve on a roller coaster, for example, inertia causes their body and blood to move along the original trajectory, resulting in a sudden increase in centrifugal force.

Scientists say that when this increased pressure is double the g-force of a resting body, the individuals’ weight at that moment is effectively doubled. At a high g-force, the weight of blood may be several times higher than at rest. The heart, in turn, strains to pump the blood around the body, especially out of the lower extremities and into the brain. Under this g-force strain, an individual experiences reduced vision, temporary blindness and finally loss of consciousness — a condition known as static hypoxia.

According to a 2004 article in the Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education and Research, the increasingly powerful fighter planes that were being developed during the interwar period seemed to be causing more accidents with pilots blacking out at the controls of aircraft that were flying higher and faster than ever before.

In the late 1930s, with the war in Europe looming, Banting realized that aviation medicine could play a strategic role in a conflict that would see increased use of bombers and fighter planes. His interest wasn’t incidental: Banting had served as an army surgeon in World War I and remained an officer in the reserves after the armistice of November 11, 1918.

Working with the RCAF, Banting moved to create an aviation medicine research team at U of T and tapped Franks, whom he’d met through a mutual friend of Charles Best (BA ’21, MA ’22, MD ’25). At the time, Franks was doing cancer research, which involved the use of a centrifuge for samples. He had noticed that glass test tubes tended to shatter in the device. But when he packed the tubes in water, they were fine.

Seconded to Banting’s project, Franks began thinking about the significance of this modification of a testing technique, and realized the water around the tube created sufficient hydrostatic pressure against the tube to counter the centrifugal force. Perhaps, he thought, the same principle would apply to human tissue.

After experimenting with mice at the Banting Institute, Franks in 1939 began developing a rudimentary version of an anti-gravity suit, which was lined with fluid-filled pockets and designed to fit snugly around a pilot’s legs and torso. To fund the research, Banting had approached an eccentric construction magnate named Harry F. McLean for a $5,000 grant. McLean, an aviation buff who once set out on a round-the-globe flying mission with his personal nurse, was known for wandering around in public, giving away large sums of cash or cheques.

Early in 1940, according to “The Remotest of Mistresses,” Peter Allen’s 1983 biographical essay on Franks, the researcher took a bespoke version of his invention to Camp Borden and went up with a RCAF pilot. Allen, a commercial flyer and accountant who first met Franks in the mid-1970s, writes that Franks had never even flown before, “much less endured high G aerobatic maneouvers.” But he and Banting were both fearless, and seized with a sense of mission (they had enlisted after Canada declared war and were given officer ranks). “It was their mentality,” Allen said in a recent interview. “They just did stuff that was risky.”

“In the airplane, I was sitting down,” Franks told Allen. “[W]hen the pressure hit, I thought [the suit] was going to cut me in two.” Wing Commander D’Arcy Greig, an ace Royal Air Force pilot, also tested the suit during secret flights at Malton in early June 1940. He came to similar conclusions. Allen quotes Greig’s report in his 1983 essay: “The suit in its present form is not a practical proposition.”

Interestingly, German scientists as early as 1931 had arrived at a the same impasse with their own version of an anti-gravity suit for pilots. They opted to discontinue their research program.

Realizing that they needed to refine the invention, Banting and Franks persuaded the RCAF to partner with U of T and Victory Aircraft (later Avro) and build a human centrifuge at the Hunt Club facility in 1941. Jordan Bimm, a PhD candidate at York University now completing a doctorate on the history of aerospace medicine, says the centrifuge looked like a giant stand mixer, with an air-tight gondola that could hold one person. The gondola’s temperature, air pressure and orientation could be altered, with internal sensors monitoring performance. (There are photos of Franks himself in the centrifuge, which was in operation until 1987.)

Franks reckoned it was possible to scale down the suit, so the coverage was limited mainly to the legs and buttocks. Bimm says Franks made numerous versions of the suit, up to “Mark 7.” “They refined it many, many times.” U of T historian Michael Bliss (BA ’62, MA ’66, PhD ’72), in his biography of Banting, described him and Franks as “tinkerers.”

“They tried things,” Allen says. “Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t.”

Following Banting’s tragic death in February 1941, Franks finished developing the suit sufficiently, such that the Royal Air Force was prepared to use it in combat. But the Allies regarded the discovery as so significant that they didn’t want to fly sorties over Europe, for fear of losing a plane operated by a pilot wearing the “Franks Flying Suit.” If the Germans captured the flyer, the RAF thought they could reverse engineer it.

Instead, RAF pilots wearing Franks’ invention were sent to North Africa to provide air support for US General Dwight Eisenhower’s invasion of Algeria in 1942. The results, Bimm says, were mixed:“They found it difficult to move around.” US researchers took over.

But senior American aviation medicine experts later told Franks his pioneering work was critical in the refinement of the technology. The work in Toronto, moreover, paved the way for the Canadian military’s sustained investment in aviation research at CFB Downsview, which continues to this day. “That traces right back to the decision to make this a competency in Canada,” says Bimm.

The military didn’t declassify information about the Franks Flying Suit until the 1950s, and Franks himself remained a low-key medical researcher until the 1970s, when, Peter Allen heard him lecture at U of T about the invention. He decided to make it his mission to ensure that Franks was duly recognized for an achievement that has reverberated through the post-war history of military flight. “Franks was a very understated man,” Allen reflects. “He just thought he was doing his job.”

Read the original story in the Faculty of Medicine Magazine

Air pollution: how bad is your neighbourhood?

sgupta — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 11:38:09 +0000

Air pollution: how bad is your neighbourhood? sgupta Mon, 11/25/2013 - 06:38

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photo courtesy Natalia Mykhaylova

John Lorinc

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John Lorinc

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PhD student's low-cost sensors could gather data across cities

Epidemiologists' understanding of the relationship between exposure to airborne pollutants and a range of health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease and asthma, has grown increasingly precise in recent years.

What’s less well known is precisely where the air is most polluted.

Toronto, for example, has only four air-quality measurement stations providing real-time data, even though research shows that the concentration of pollutants such as nitric oxides, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide can vary by orders of magnitude within an area spanning just a few city blocks.

To more precisely gauge pollution levels, Natalia Mykhaylova, a PhD candidate in chemical engineering, is developing an inexpensive air-quality monitor that could be deployed on utility poles across a city. The shoebox-sized device, which is packed with sensors and detectors that can measure the concentration of fine particles and the pollutants mentioned above, will eventually be powered by lithium batteries and small solar panels.

The total price of the components can be kept to less than $300, Mykhaylova says, and the monitor can be adapted for indoor sites.

Mykhaylova, who works in the Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research in U of T’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, says her vision is to one day connect the monitors wirelessly to a data network so the measurements can be fed into a central database in real time. Such a network would allow users to go to a website to check pollution levels in specific neighbourhoods with an eye to adjusting their travel patterns or pressuring public officials to deal with local pollution sources.

For now, Mykhaylova and her team have placed a dozen of their homemade pollution-monitoring stations in backyards near highways around the city and are trying to determine the traffic’s impact on nearby air quality.

Mykhaylova lives near the Gardiner Expressway and a large industrial facility, so she is keenly aware of the potential health consequences of living close to highways – something a growing number of Toronto condo dwellers now experience.

The ultimate goal is to encourage local governments to deploy commercial versions of these low-cost devices in large numbers around urban areas as a way of generating a much more nuanced and up-to-the-minute picture of the invisible geography of pollution.

“The government needs to have this data out there for people to know what the levels are,” says Mykhaylova.

This article previously appeared in the U of T Magazine; for more articles visit www.magazine.utoronto.ca

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U of T entrepreneurs: Shayan Hamidi and Rokham Fard

sgupta — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 10:25:25 +0000

U of T entrepreneurs: Shayan Hamidi and Rokham Fard sgupta Mon, 07/29/2013 - 06:25

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Tarik Gidamy, Shayan Hamidi, Rokham Fard (photo by Liam Sharp)

John Lorinc

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John Lorinc

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Computer Science grads tackle the condo business

Shayan Hamidi and Rokham Fard freely admit they had no idea what kind of a fight they were picking when, as 20-something Computer Science grads with ambitions to launch some kind of business, they decided to invent a fresher and more transparent way to buy and sell homes.

It started innocently enough: Hamidi had had a nasty experience trying to sell his parents’ home and buy condos for them and himself. He ended up with a part-time broker who tried to up-sell a pre-built apartment by $70,000, possibly to boost her commission.

As Hamidi and Fard unpacked the experience, they realized there was no centralized database of solid information about Greater Toronto’s condos still under construction. As they dug further, they realized that the Canadian real estate industry was years behind its counterparts in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia when it came to providing online consumer information about homes and apartments for sale.

“The whole experience felt pretty dated,” says Hamidi, 31, co-founder of the Red Pin.“Transparency was the answer.”

Adds Fard: “We thought that would be a really interesting gap to bridge.”

The two friends, together with Tarik Gidamy and Ali Ajellu, who graduated from New College with a BSc in 2007, launched TheRedPin.com in 2010 with links to condo projects. (Read about TheRedPin.com.)

Problem was, the builders didn’t respond to consumer requests for information that came through the site, prompting complaints from their earliest customers.

“That was a wake-up moment,” says Hamidi.

Two years ago, the partners decided to obtain a broker’s licence and remake their firm as a real estate broker with a foot planted firmly in the online world. Last year, armed with $2.7 million in investor backing, TheRedPin.com re-emerged as a gutsy, mold-busting challenger to the entrenched GTA real estate industry. Hamidi and his team say their admittedly idealistic goal is to put buyers and sellers at the centre of the home-buying process. To that end, they jettisoned one of the industry’s sacred cows: commission-based compensation for agents.

Instead, the Red Pin’s 13 sales reps are employees compensated on a salary-and-bonus formula that takes into account feedback from customer-satisfaction surveys. They must also follow closely established work-flow procedures so clients get their full attention and answer to customer service personnel known as “angels.”

“We’ve taken the interests of the agents out of it,” says Hamidi, who points out that many agent-brokers, who are essentially franchisees for the real estate firms, spend about two-thirds of their time prospecting for new clients instead of helping the ones they’re representing. The point of the Red Pin approach is to align the agents’ interests with those of the customers as a way of short-circuiting the sort of cynicism that inspired David Mamet’s searing send-up of the realtor trade, Glengarry Glen Ross (which, by they way, they’ve watched with interest).

The company has also sought to create a kind of one-stop research approach with its website: besides the MLS listings and thousands of floor plans from pre-build condo projects, the company offers a lively mash-up of interactive maps with up-to-date information about local school rankings, stores and services, as well as time-series data on housing prices.

Strategically, the point of the exercise is to soft-sell potential buyers by using links to developers’ websites, search-engine optimization techniques and email newsletters designed to draw them to TheRedPin.com’s wealth of educational information long before they’ve signed a binding broker agreement. It’s a classic honey-pot strategy: they figured they could leverage their data-rich site to entice prospective homebuyers to sign with them instead of one of the more established firms.

Most real estate agents prefer more traditional techniques, such as flyer drops and billboard advertising. But, as Fard points out, “Ninety-eight per cent of Canadians who want homes start their search online, according to Statistics Canada.”

Adds Hamidi: “We don’t have millions to put into shiny ads. Our advantage is to be engaging online.”

Having completed $100-million worth of real estate transactions in the past 18 months, Hamidi and Fard feel confident they’ve seen the future of home-buying. “We think this is where the market is going to go.”

John Lorinc is a writer for U of T Magazine. (See more stories about U of T startups at U of T Magazine.)

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John Lorinc

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Read the original story in the Faculty of Medicine Magazine

Air pollution: how bad is your neighbourhood?

U of T entrepreneurs: Shayan Hamidi and Rokham Fard