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November 2, 2011
By Lauren Seabrook

Bike deaths preventable

A new review is being conducted on the rising number of cyclist deaths annually in Ontario. There are 15 to 20 deaths per year as a result of cycling accidents.

A review issued by the office of the chief coroner for Ontario, Andrew McCallum, will reveal the common causes of cyclist deaths. This report will be completed in spring 2012.

Dan Cass, regional supervising coroner for the Toronto Region, commented “15 to 20 deaths is still 15 to 20 deaths more than we’d like to see. Every cycling death is a preventable death.”

According to Cass, the coroner’s office is simply looking to find ways to make cycling safer and decrease the likelihood of deaths in the future.

This review will look into the age and location of each death from 2006-10. The most important part of the review will be whether these accidents were preventable with a helmet and whether distractions such as cell phones were involved.

To stay safe on the road, Cass recommended common sense and a helmet.

—Victoria Marroccoli

 

RIM gets sued

For students who suffered through the BlackBerry data outage from October 11-14, help is on the way.

Jeff Orenstein, founder of Consumer Law Group in Montreal, has filed a class action lawsuit pertaining to how Researh In Motion handled the data crash.

As an apology for the service outage, RIM offered their users $100 worth of free apps, such as Bejeweled, Texas Hold ‘Em and BubbleBash2, which are available for download before December 31 at no charge.

According to Orenstein, the company failed to properly compensate their affected customers, especially because RIM did not give their customers a choice in the apps offered.

“To put credit on next month’s bill would have been the best plan, but they didn’t do that,” he said.  “I think for most people, they don’t want the free apps.”

Orenstein continued that he hopes the lawsuit will end with all participants receiving a $100 credit on their next phone bill at RIM’s expense.

—Lauren Seabrook

 

 

Say good-bye to unwanted calls

To better control unwanted telemarketing calls from foreign nations, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, along with 12 other global telecommunication enforcement agencies, are working to create a global no-call list.

“There is no new list per se. It is an international network […] to track down violators,” Eleanor Belshaw-Hauff, a spokesperson for the CRTC, explained. “The Canadian list is still in effect.”

Canadians who are already on the do not call list do not have to register for a second global list.

Anyone interested in registering for the national list can either call the CRTC or visit their website. Registration is simple, taking affect within 31 days of signing up and expiring after five active years.

The do not call list can be applied to any and all Canadian telephone numbers, including Voice Over Internet Protocol and wireless numbers. Penalties for calling those on the no call list are between $1,500 and $15,000.

—Kate Eadie

 

Five cent toilet invented

The University of Toronto’s efforts to reinvent the toilet may have a Western solution.

In response to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s $3 million challenge, a Toronto engineering team has been tasked to develop a self-contained toilet without reliance on running water, sewage connection or electricity and costs at a maximum of 5 cents per day to use.

Facing difficulties with disposal of solid waste, however, the Toronto team contacted Jason Gerhard, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Western, with the intention to apply his soil decontamination technology to their cause.

In association with Jose Torero, a University of Edinburgh professor, Gerhard co-founded this STAR (Self-sustaining Treatment for Active Remediation) technology to destroy over 99 per cent of contaminants in soil through the process of smoldering combustion. As this process is able to convert organic material such as oil, coal-tar and oxygen into water, carbon dioxide and heat with minimal use of energy and water, the Toronto team considered it a potential solution for disposing solid human waste.

If successful, these reinvented toilets would address the sanitation needs of 2.6 billion people throughout the developing world and potentially prevent 1.5 million annual deaths from diarrhea, dysentery and cholera.

—Mason Zimmer

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