This club focuses on spreading information on this new degree program and what public health is all about. They promote positive health and their goal is to spread the importance of public health in the community.
They would like more students to recognize and understand the importance of public health and to raise awareness of what public health is and how we should appreciate the chance we have to study public health here.
Their members receive help with public health-related career options and also an understanding of what students can do with a public health degree. They are a small club but they are growing fast and anyone with an interest can join by e-mailing phsa.club@uleth.ca. They alternate meetings and events each month.

Since public health is a new program they are planning to help students explore their options on practicum, understand the program better, and what students can do with a public health degree. This semester they worked with the Pre-Med Club for the run/walk 5km/10km to raise much needed funds for the Student Union Food Bank. Last year they hosted speakers to talk about different career options available and how to look for jobs (resume writing and job hunting).

Come out to an event and learn what public health means to you and your community!

I can appreciate that working within the university community takes a lot of diplomacy. Certain situations will arise where bureaucratic bullshit will take precedence, and the prescribed way of doing things will, on occasion, be the best way to do something. The game of politics exists, especially in an organization where multiple governing bodies all want their say, but the last thing the student population needs at the U of L are more yes-men in their governing structure.

Its time some hard-hitting, agenda-oriented individuals start getting a few things done on campus. Deals need to be worked out to ensure that things are happening for the students and that university spending is controlled in the interest of the students attending this institution. Accountability to the student population and efforts that include more progressive events than campus parties and Zoo events need to be made a priority.

I’m not saying cut out the fun and games; I think Fresh Fest and other campus events are a great way to encourage campus community spirit, but when they crash and burn like this year’s unsuccessful Oktoberfest and Meltdown, certain considerations must be made and event planning and budgeting must be revised. Throwing money at a problem will not solve it, as numerous historical examples can attest to.

Further, the SU lacks a proper face with the student body. Last year, campaign promises were made to engage the students more with the union, letting them know what kind of services are available. I have yet to see any effort made in this regard, and the majority of students roaming the halls at the university still don’t know what their SU can do for them.

This is not entirely the SU’s fault. Disinterested, apathetic students who care nothing for their campus community are a root cause of problems on campus. A lack of volunteer base, as well as a lack of interest in any of the major events for the year curtail any room for expansion in SU efforts to better the school. The student population must be more responsive and the SU needs to grow some proverbial balls when dealing with the campus culture.

Monopolies on campus belonging to the Coca Cola company and Sodexho that have unnecessary associated costs and are gouging the already impoverished average student need to be carefully considered by the Students Union. With over 8,000 undergraduate students on campus, it is clear that the SU has a lot of power, or at least should have, and should be highly motivated in representing its membership. Alternatively, its membership should learn to demand more from their representatives and give them some direction.

So to all you readers running or voting in the SU elections, I beg you to think about how you will best represent the student population, and remember that your position may have to make some hard-hitting decisions and stand ground against the daunting prospect of both the university and other corporations with vested interests in campus. The saddest part of this university is the general disinterest and apathy in the student population: taking the hits time and again without raising too much of a stink. The students here keep their heads down and plough through the requirements for their degrees instead of making a concerted effort to make this school a place to be proud of.

It is therefore my hope that future student government will shed the stigma of being university yes-men and start investing in their union. We are all in this together; time to ameliorate.

Where volunteering should, but apparently doesn’t, become an issue is when it becomes a standard requirement for receiving scholarships or for entry into graduate programs. To flesh out this argument, take two students of roughly the same age, academic ability, work ethic, and so on, as a hypothetical example. Set them up in a university, working towards the same undergraduate degree with the hopes of making it into medical school at the end of the day. The only significant difference between them is the amount of financial support they receive from their respective families; one student has to work full time to support himself, while the other has the free time to fill (as it happens) with volunteering. At the end of the day, all other things being equal, the student most likely to achieve entry into medical school will be the one from a higher socioeconomic background, who had the free time and financial stability to pad his C.V. with some volunteer hours. To put it bluntly, mandatory volunteerism is class discrimination in its most subtle form.

And this is to say nothing about its effects on the intentions of those contributing their time. Someone volunteering solely because of social pressures will be less motivated, less thorough, less careful, and ultimately less useful than someone who feels strongly about volunteering to support a specific cause. This logic spirals into dangerous territory when you consider that many individuals are volunteering in animal rescue shelters, nursing homes, or after-school childcare programs; if they’re only there to clock some volunteer hours, arguably they shouldn’t be there at all.

By now, anyone who knows me will be raring to whip out the “hypocrite” card. I’ll admit it, I volunteer from time to time… Who knows, I could even use this contribution to the school newspaper to make myself look a little better on paper; the irony is palpable. But at the end of the day, I’ll be the first to admit that I am extremely lucky to have a supportive family and that I’ve simply learnt to play by society’s rules. If volunteering will give me an edge when applying for scholarships, or to graduate school, I’ll do it, and I’ll try to do a good job. In the meantime, I’ll keep spewing my views to anyone who will listen. I hope, eventually, institutions will begin to realize that volunteerism should be left to the altruistic Carnegies and Bill Gates’ of the world and not forced on the student who eats Kraft Dinner six times a week.

She spoke about a hot topic on everyone’s minds right now, hydraulic fracturing, and specifically its occurrence on First Nations lands and how it is poisoning the drinking water and the land. Much like every speaker, she spoke about the dangers of capitalism and the negative effects it has on the population.

The end of her speech focused on First Nations visibility. By being invisible for so long, she said, their problems have been able to spread easily because they have been ignored. It is at a crisis point now. First Nations youth have a very high suicide rate, more children are in state care right now than were in residential schools, and only 8 per cent go on to graduate from university. She sees the solution to this problem as being the visibility of the problems themselves. Her speech was a touching look at the deep-rooted problems for aboriginal people around the world.

Up next was Madison Webber, a gender and women’s studies major with a minor in philosophy. She spoke about the interrelatedness of the problems in the world. More importantly, the predatory economic system many countries have nurtured which has allowed money to come before people. She also spoke about corrupt governments and political systems that prey on the weak instead of helping. The combination of capitalism and governments who are benefiting from it has allowed corporations to pillage the earth. Without political control we will continue to destroy our planet. Madison sees climate change as the single greatest challenge faced by the human race.

This round of speakers was very inspiring and both spoke passionately about their topics. Sea Marsland won this round so we’ll be seeing her in the semi-finals! Tune in next week to hear how Martin Heavy Head and Danika Jorgenson-McGuire did!

Relay for Life U of L top 10 ranks as of Feb. 7, 2012:

• 1st — Wilson MacDonald — 452
• 2nd — Maria Rosvick — 416
• 3rd — Caij Meloche — 225
• 4th — Terri Browning — 212
• 5th — Ashley Spiers — 170
• 6th — Curtis Sheck — 160
• 7th — Sara Kotelniski — 105
• 8th — Rylee Keller — 97
• 9th — Aaron Broszat — 35
• 10th — Kendra Wilson — 15

The overall ranking has been updated on the Relay for Life Star event wall at www.facebook.com/RFL.Star. If you have any questions, contact Dee Goyal (dipankar.goyal@uleth.ca) or Scott Paterson (scott.paterson@cancer.ab.ca).

Unfortunately, some people are not equipped to handle the fight it takes to battle exams. Having elevated cortisol levels for a short period of time is relatively harmless, but if you are the type of student who stresses all semester long then you may be in trouble. When your body isn’t given the opportunity to maintain normal levels of cortisol, over time you may be at risk to experience decreased bone density, a decrease in muscle tissue, lowered immunity, high blood pressure, and impaired cognitive performance (hello C-!). In more extreme cases, prolonged stress may lead to a disorder called Cushing’s syndrome. Cushing’s syndrome is a condition which keeps your blood pressure high, produces pinky-purple stretch marks on your abdomen, leaves you feeling tired, depressed, moody, and leads to increased fat production on your back, and may also lead to diabetes.

While it may sound like I’m picking on cortisol, I would just like to clarify that as it is naturally produced by your body, it is not inherently bad – it is more about the conditions to which you expose yourself that play a bad part. Cortisol is actually top notch in the right circumstances. For example, the ability to fight or flight is the only reason man has survived throughout time (not to mention the super-human strength that can be experienced with this response is an added bonus). Cortisol is also responsible for the inflammatory response – the ability to not really feel pain immediately after being injured. Cortisol regulates insulin, a proper glucose metabolism, regulation of blood pressure, and heightened memory.

Instead of blaming cortisol for the slew of negative symptoms you may experience during exam week, you may want to check your lifestyle and learn how to manage stress rather than blame stress. Since this is the lifestyle section I can’t help but put the highest priority on exercising. Not only because exercising actually is the best way to manage stress, but also because it is the easiest and most cost-efficient way (the least cost efficient way being prescription anti-depressants). Don’t think of exercise as strictly going to the gym, but rather as a choice to walk instead of drive to school, take the stairs instead of the elevator, or even have an elementary school flashback by dancing like a bunch of crazies with your roomies – basically anything that will increase your heart rate. Your body is built for movement, especially in stressful situations. Sex is also a good option for releasing those feel good hormones (endorphins) to combat high levels of the stress hormone.

Are you the type of person who would rather drink your sorrows away instead of sweat them away? While a night on the town may seem satisfying, you’re actually making yourself more sensitive to the harmful effects of stress. It is unrealistic to expect a university student to lay off the booze entirely, so instead I encourage you to find balance. Try to face your stress in a positive way. This could be anything from scheduling your time more effectively (structure won’t always prevent stress but it will make you more prepared to handle stress), to having a bath or basically anything else that is dedicated to your enjoyment. Just because you’re in university doesn’t mean you have to give up what makes you happy.

When the TLFs began in the 1960s, they consisted of ironic phrases, jokes, encouraging mantras, and messages of friendship, hope, love, and constructive criticism. In recent years, the primary focus has been bullying, discouraging the sharing of opinions in class, name-calling, and other acts of hostility against other people or organizations at this institution. While we at the Meliorist do encourage our readership to share an opinion as openly as possible, there is a line between constructive criticism and outright bullying. We ask our fellow students to recognize this boundary and observe it carefully.

According to our recent calculations 24 per cent of TLFs posted online since the beginning of January are prime examples of overt bullying. We will therefore be monitoring the TLFs very carefully over the next few weeks and removing all comments that make specific mention of any student, faculty, or staff member in a way that may be construed as overt bullying. While we encourage our students to think critically of others, consider opinions with an open mind, and voice constructive criticism or well-considered debate, we ask them to please refrain from discouraging discussion, thought-sharing, and asking questions either during or outside of class time.

This university prides itself on “principles of liberal education where inspired teaching is emphasized within a personalized and interactive learning environment…” and where “…student engagement in learning, creative activities, and research takes place every day.” (President’s Welcome, uleth.ca) Therefore class discussion, if encouraged by the professor, should be an opportunity for students to voice opinions and ask questions without fear of persecution from classmates. Keeping an open mind and intellectually debating points, opinions, and criticisms is what university life should be about, especially here at the University of Lethbridge.

We at the Meliorist therefore extend our apologies to the students negatively affected by the content of the TLFs and hope that others on campus will support and join our efforts to make this a fun, safe, and meaningful forum of student expression. We remind you all that the views expressed in the TLFs do not represent the views of the Meliorist Publishing Society and its staff. The TLFs are user-generated content created by the student population at the University of Lethbridge and therefore should be considered an open forum for constructive opinion-sharing and debate on relevant topics, as a fun interactive forum for students to joke, and post positive comments about any subject matter.

We encourage those who enjoy posting to the TLFs to continue to do so and make a concerted effort to provide feedback on how you think the TLFs should be monitored. We also encourage anyone who has not posted to the TLFs, but would like to try, to visit www.themeliorist.ca/tlf and review the protocol. Please note that you cannot post to the TLF website without a valid Uleth email address.

Further, to those students negatively affected by the comments in the TLF section, we hope you will continue to enjoy your post-secondary education at this institution and never be afraid to voice an opinion or ask a question during class time if it pertains to the topic and is for relevant discussion. Despite these hopes, there will always be students who disagree with you, but that does not mean your voice is invalid or should not be heard. To the critics in the classrooms who disagree with opinions of other students: university is a forum for debate, so why not start one? Professors will regulate discussion times on topics and keep a lecture rolling if need be. Otherwise, we are certain most faculty and teaching staff will agree that to see students actively debating or discussing a topic with sound arguments and intellectual points is the highlight of any teacher’s day. Professors and teachers are not just here to teach us what to think, but how to think and form our own conclusions. That is what university is, and we at the Meliorist hope that every student at the University of Lethbridge is proud to find his or her own voice.

We thank you for your attention. Any comments or complaints may be directed to Kelti Boissonneault at einc@themeliorist.ca. The TLFs will return to their regular page after Reading Week. Enjoy a safe and relaxing holiday.

Yours in trust,

The Meliorist Publishing Society Board of Directors

&

Kelti Boissonneault – Editor-in-Chief 

1) Plot.

Well, this is embarrassing; Wikipedia informs me that both are in fact modern jumble puzzles of ancient myths. Approximately 2,200 years and 1,600 years since the fall of the Greek states and the Roman Empire, respectively, the ghostly remains of these ancient cultures’ myths are being stitched back together from scrap, hosed down in glitter and hauled onto the street corner. But how does the plot actually unfold in each?

In Immortals, a muscular young man must strip naked and yoga fight his way across green screen Greece, occasionally gobbling up little snippets of a plot-like substance that was, in fact, made from paper-mache: a combination of a copy Scorpion King and Twilight into a Cuisinart, with the sweat of a million muscled men as a binding liquid. At first I was satisfied, but then awoke the next day unsure of what had happened. Sound familiar? The plot traipses through snippets of a series of myth which, though it made for very shiny pictures, gives it a very schizophrenic feel. Not to mention characters keep getting killed then reappearing later, not that Valentine’s Day involves much suspension of disbelief either.

In St. Valentine’s Day a paunchy young man must make an expedient trip to the liquor store where he encounters no plot, no snippet of meaning save the cool grace of a colt 45. And speaking of shooting blanks, both involve bows but they stop being important halfway though. The point is neither of them seem to really engage; from the get go I perceive that nobody truly likable is involved in this.

One point each.

2) Action.

Heh.

Two points to Immortals.

Alternatively: “Take the next man that groans outside and shoot him.”

3) Personal impressions

My personal impressions on Valentine’s Day are grimly perfunctory, in every sense of the expression. But I’m afraid The Immortals fares even less well. I was a little jarred by the difference between the set and costume. Namely that the sets evoke the image of baroque painting but the costumes are Spartan. People put far more effort into their Valentine’s Day costumes on the whole. But that’s just nitpicking. The real problem is that this is stacked in favour of Valentine’s Day; while the bliss of novel experience only lasts a few hours, the grim purgatory of a recurring day stays with you for life. Immortals is pretty, yes, but it’s the sort of thing that you get really excited about, throw something, and start yelling bread and circuses; finally you realize that you’re being silly.

Two points to Valentine’s Day.

To cast a shroud over your growing suspicion that I am merely complaining about two random things I do not like, because complaint is cheap, allow me to segue into the conclusion. The Immortals was by no means anything more than a series of tableaux, and never before has a 3D character been so mono-dimensional. But stop and examine most of your relations with other people, and you ought to realize that you should find this ever so familiar. In the end it is an unimpressive tie, while both have a few interesting tidbits, it’s just not something you ought to devote more than one day a year to, and certainly not without liquor.

Tally: Immortals – 3, St. Valentine’s Day – 3. Winner: the liquor industry.

Modern Love

You’ll need:

The Passion:

• 1 1/2 oz of 150 proof whisky (left over at your place by the one night stand)
• A few cinnamon hearts (Mine the pile of candy. You’ll find a few)
• A lighter

The Rest:

• A glass
• 2 oz of orange juice
• 2 oz of lime juice
• 1 tbsp of grenadine

Drop your cinnamon hearts into the shot of whisky and put it aside. Combine ingredients for The Rest into a glass.

Light The Passion, drown it in The Rest, and deal with Modern Love.

Imagine, if you will, the following: “There’s this vast, weird, constantly evolving circus, Le Cirque des Rêves, which is made of firelight and shadows and chiaroscuro magic.” It’s a world of illusion, mystery, and memory, locked in the ink and paper of print. Two weeks before the book containing this circus was released, however, readers were invited to open their browsers, and insert themselves into the world of The Night Circus.

“The Circus arrives without warning”

As you can read above, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern has become an internationally acclaimed novel, featuring romance, fantasy, and intrigue. A very different sort of Night Circus was made public, however, before the book was made public. It’s an interactive story built by Failbetter Games, a seven-person UK housed design company who were given the task to create a social media game based in the world Erin Morgenstern created. The concept is deceptively simple: log in through Twitter or Facebook, and pick a card. Upon doing so, a profile is created, and you are invited to jump headfirst into Le Cirque des Rêves, the titular event at the heart of the novel. Each card presents a one or two sentence storylet that slowly amounts into an understanding of what exactly lies at the heart of the Cirque, and wraps the player into Morgenstern’s narrative.

Interactive storytelling plus Facebook

The simple game play of The Night Circus is contrasted by the deep narrative it masks. The game is set up as an application for Facebook or Twitter, and users log in through either one or the other social media platform. Upon doing so, they draw six Opportunity Cards, which renew themselves once every two minutes. The cards themselves will either allow a friend to join them in the game, present an act at the circus, or simply present the player with a choice about his or her path inside Le Cirque des Rêves. Depending on your choices, you gain goals to complete, and through their completion reveal more and more of the story of The Night Circus. You also collect mementos, such as Notes of Music, Memories of Play, or Sweet Sorrows, which can be combined into bigger and better opportunities. Additionally, the more friends you invite (This is a Facebook-based game, after all) increases your Rêveur rank, which opens up new and interesting storylets.

Featuring five distinctive performances (and more content than you can shake a stick at), The Night Circus acted both as an excellent standalone narrative, and as one of the better advertizing campaigns of 2011 – which is what it was, after all. By releasing the game two weeks before the actual book came out, the game acted as a stepping stone into the world of the novel, without spoiling any of the actual content. The company described the opportunity as such: “The Night Circus has been like a playground for us – we’ve added new acts and moved the circus to five different cities around the world, and illustrated it with Paul’s beautiful, enigmatic artwork. Above all, we’ve tried to tell stories that draw you-the-reader into the centre of your own narrative while meshing into the background fabric of the novel.”

Stepping into a bigger, better book.

In early 2011, Random House Publishing approached Failbetter Games with a rather interesting idea: create an online advertizing campaign for the novel, using the interactive narrative system developed for Failbetter’s flagship game, Echo Bazaar! (think Victorian Gothic stitched together with Lovecraftian Steam-punk, with Wilde observing the operation). They were given free reign with the concept, and allowed to write as much as they liked, so long as they did not step on the toes of the novel itself. It worked out rather well: many bits of the book are told in the second person format of the reader exploring the mysteries and delights of the circus itself, which meshed with the game play aspects Failbetter Games specializes in.

The movement into interactive online narrative has been gaining popularity in everything from advertizing to alternate reality gaming. Pottermore, for example, was J.K. Rowling’s answer to clamouring calls from readers for an “enhanced” Harry Potter experience. Readers create a profile, are assigned to a house, and must navigate the seven Potter books as an interactive experience, gaining items and wands and spells and such. The most important part, according to Failbetter Games, is the idea that “You-the-player have a relationship with the text that involves you putting choices and interpretations into it to create a narrative that’s personal to you.” Personalization of narrative is the driving force behind both The Night Circus and Echo Bazaar!: it turns a story into your story, without sacrificing content or quality.