Names in the News

Concordia faculty, staff and alumni/æ pop up in the media more often than you might think!

Bala Ashtakala (Mechanical Engineering) was interviewed on March 6 on Channel 9's dinner-hour TV program. He was asked to comment on traffic problems that could be created by the new Expos baseball stadium near Molson Centre in downtown Montreal. He said that the new stadium could add 10,000 to 15,000 vehicles to the local traffic on the days when the games are held. This would aggravate the traffic flows on the streets surrounding the stadium. Also, if baseball games at the new stadium and hockey games at Molson Centre are held concurrently, enormous traffic jams would be created in that area.

On the same program, Ashtakala said that a heavy snowfall, cold temperatures and an early thaw contributed to the early development of potholes this year. Preventive maintenance, such as sealing the cracks in the fall, use of high-grade asphalt cement with additives and avoidance of de-icing salts would help prevent potholes.

The artist Irene F. Whittome, who has taught for many years in the Faculty of Fine Arts, was the subject of The Arts Tonight, on the CBC Radio network, on April 3. Curator Johanne Lamoureaux described Whittome's extraordinary work with turtles, eggs, trees and other images of fecundity and reproduction in her show, Irene F. Whittome: Bio-Fictions, which will be at the MusŽe du QuŽbec in Quebec City all summer.

Pascale Bussières, who has studied film here, was interviewed for The Globe and Mail by film critic Matthew Hays (BFA 91, MA 99). The actress, a major Quebec star, has worked with many adventurous directors, including Micheline Lantôt, Guy Maddin and Bruce McDonald. Her portrayal of a Calvinist lesbian in Patricia Rozema's When Night is Falling was so popular that the film ran for a year and a half at a cinema in Paris. Her latest film is La BeautŽ de Pandore, the third in a trilogy by Charles BinamŽ.

The spring/summer issue of Montreal Review of Books is full of Concordia authors, including QSPELL winner Elyse Gasco (BA 88 Creative Writing), Commonwealth Prize winner Jeffrey Moore (a lecturer in ƒtudes franaises), Catherine Bush (who has left a tenure-track teaching post in the English Department to concentrate on her writing), David Solway (writer-in-residence) and Film Studies Professor Carole Zucker, whose book In the Company of Actors was favourably reviewed.

Steven Appelbaum (Management) was interviewed for The Gazette's Saturday careers column on having fun at the office. He said that a collegial workplace, in which people are encouraged to support each other, instead of competing, is great for business.

The most recent issue of the National Post's magazine Business had a wide-eyed boy on the cover. He is Keith Peiris, the 11-year-old president and CEO of Cyberteks Design, based in the basement of his parents' home in a suburb of London, Ont. Much of his success is credited in the article to his father, Deepal, and his mother, Sriya Peiris, who graduated from Concordia in 1983 with a PhD in Science, shortly after coming to Canada from Sri Lanka.

In the same magazine, in an article on the extraordinary inflation of high-tech stocks, Lawrence Kryzanowski (Finance) explains the "greater fool theory." "It's okay to buy one of these stocks as long as there is a greater fool in the line behind you." He also compared this era to the one that preceded the crash of 1929, when there was a mood of great optimism.

The views of small-teams experts Raye Kass and James Kass (Applied Human Sciences) were widely reported after the brouhaha over the unsolicited New Year's kisses Dr. Judith Lapierre said she received while sequestered with a group of male astronauts as part of an experiment. The Kasses told national and international media that the incident points up the need for more team training on gender and cultural differences before sending astronauts up in space.

Graeme Decarie (History) was quoted in a Canadian Press article printed in a number of papers regarding Quebec nationalist filmmaker Louis Falardeau's latest project on the 1837 Patriote Rebellion. If the rebels had won, Decarie said, "Quebec would have become part of the States, and French Quebec would now be speaking English."

There was a good review in Performing Arts and Entertainment of the latest recording by the Andrew Homzy Ensemble. Called simply Jelly Roll Morton (DSM 3030), it was recorded in Montreal's Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur in 1998. The players include Professor Homzy and a number of his colleagues in the Music Department.