Names in the News

Leukemia is no obstacle for Concordia student Damon Hartung (Political Science), according to a story in The Gazette. Hartung was told he had contracted the life-threatening disease last December. However, it did not stop him from running for president of the Political Science Students Association.

L’Actualité featured a portrait of alumna Katia Jarjoura (Journalism) who spent some time in the city of Karbala in Iraq while preparing the documentary L’appel de Kerbala about a principal shrine for Shiite Muslims. Her film is to be shown this fall on Télé-Québec.

Zsolt Szigetvari (John Molson School of Business, Communication Studies) and John Connolly (John Molson School of Business) have teamed up to create the Internet search directory Zenome. In a Gazette story March 29, Szigetvari and Connolly describe their project as a community-based research tool that produces “fewer pages, but much more precise, relevant results” as compared to the giants Yahoo and Google.

Joanne Locke, vice-dean of curriculum and appraisals in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, supports the argument that liberal arts degrees are valuable because they give students transferable skills. In The Gazette article titled “Arts degrees open doors,” Locke says parents should be aware that employers in fact seek out arts graduates because of their critical, analytical and argumentative abilities.

Edith Brunette, Cinema student and communications director for the Proje(c)t Y short film festival, was quoted in The Gazette about this annual event, launched at Concordia in 1997. The festival gives rare opportunity for film students to show their work “outside their academic environment,” Brunette said. Her five-minute film Silence Variations was also screened during the three-day festival.

Mrugank V. Thakor and Lea Katsanis, both associate professors of marketing, were interviewed by La Presse on Bell Canada’s recent acquisition of 50 per cent of the wireless telephone company Virgin Mobile Canada. Both Thakor and Katsanis are optimistic about Bell’s future success in this deal. Maybe Bell is looking into buying the whole company, once it penetrates the young people’s market, Katsanis speculated.

Patsy Lightbown (Applied Linguistics) was quoted in a Gazette story about earlier and more serious English language instruction in Quebec schools. Lightbown says that Grade 6 students who take intensive ESL classes during the school year know as much English as high school students who have studied the same number of hours over a longer period of time. In the same article, Joanna White (TESL Centre) asks why it is all right for English students to start learning French in Grade 1, but “it’s not OK for French kids to learn English early.”

The Gazette’s François Shalom’s regular column, Entrepreneurs, featured a story on Mechtronix, a flight-simulator manufacturing company founded almost 20 years ago by two Concordia engineering students, Fernando Petruziello and Jo Frazao. Today, Mechtronix is a prosperous firm on a global scale, with big clients such as Bombardier and Panama’s Copa Airlines.

An article on online chatting in The Gazette profiles research done by Richard Schmid (Education) and graduate student Sharon Peters. They have discovered that academically successful students have the least enjoyment from chatting online with their peers, while “average and learning-challenged” students enjoy it the most.

In a Gazette story April 12, Enn Raudsepp (Journalism) endorsed the Superior Court decision to fine CHOI-FM and its morning host Jeff Fillion for bullying weather reporter Sophie Chiasson on the airwaves.