Ryerson University

Ryerson University

Ryerson University is a public research university located in downtown Toronto. Its urban campus surrounds the Yonge-Dundas Square. The university has a focus on applied, career-oriented education.

Ryerson University is home to Canada’s largest undergraduate business school, the Ted Rogers School of Management, and Canada’s third largest undergraduate engineering school, the George Vari Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science, as well as the Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Communication & Design, Faculty of Community Services, and the Faculty of Science.

In addition to offering full-time and part-time undergraduate and graduate programs leading to Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees, the university also offers part-time degrees, distance education and certificates through the G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education.

The Ryerson Institute of Technology was founded in 1948, inheriting the staff and facilities of the Toronto Training and Re-establishment Institute. In 1966, it became the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.

The Toronto Training and Re-establishment Institute was created in 1945 on the former site of the Toronto Normal School at St James Square, bounded by Gerrard, Church, Yonge and Gould. The Gothic-Romanesque building was designed by architects Thomas Ridout and Frederick William Cumberland in 1852.

In 1992, Ryerson became Toronto’s second school of engineering to receive accreditation from the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB).

In 1993, Ryerson formally became a University, via an Act of the Ontario Legislature. That year, Ryerson received approval to grant graduate degrees (master’s and doctorates). The same year, the Board of Governors changed the institution’s name to Ryerson Polytechnic University to reflect a stronger emphasis on research associated with graduate programs and its expansion from being a university offering undergraduate degrees.

In 1971, provincial legislation was amended to permit Ryerson to grant university degrees accredited by both provincial government legislation and by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC).

In June 2001, the school assumed its current name as Ryerson University. Today, Ryerson University offers programs in chemical, civil, mechanical, industrial, electrical, biomedical and computer engineering. Ryerson is Canada’s leader in innovative, career-focused education and a university clearly on the move. It is a distinctly urban university with a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship. Ryerson has a mission to serve societal need and a long-standing commitment to engaging its community. It offers more than 100 undergraduate and graduate programs.

Ryerson University. The John Craig Eaton Garden. Chancellor 1999 - 2006

A sculpture of a bird in a court of the university. In 1971, the university became a member of the Council of Ontario Universities (COU).

Egerton Ryerson, founder of the university. Egerton Ryerson was a leading educator, politician, and Methodist minister. He is known as the father of Ontario's public school system. In 1852 at the core of the present main campus, the historic St. James Square, Egerton Ryerson founded Ontario's first teacher training facility, the Toronto Normal School.

Ryerson University urban campus, central area.

Ryerson University theatre.

Ryerson University Tower. Motto of the Ryerson University: Mente et Artificio (Mind and Skill)

This coat of arms in Ohio sandstone is a composite of a design by Governor John Graves Simcoe (1791 - 1796) to which were added the motto (religio, scientia, libertas) and the beaver by Dr. Egerton Ryerson, Ontario's first superintendent of education. Governor Simcoe's design served as the seal of Upper Canada, and Dr. Ryerson used the composite as the insignia of the Department of Education.

The university is named after the Reverend Egerton Ryerson, founder of the procince’s education system, the Ryerson Institute of Technology was established in 1948 to provide technological education for post-secondary school students.

Established in 1948, Ryerson University is a public research university located in Toronto, Ontario. Its urban campus is in downtown Toronto.

The majority of the buildings of the university are in the blocks northeast of the Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto’s Garden District. Ryerson’s business school, Ted Rogers School of Management (Canada`s largest undergraduate business school) is on the southwest end of the Yonge-Dundas Square, on Bay Street, north of Toronto’s Financial District. It is attached to the Toronto Eaton Centre.

The Mattamy Athletic Centre, is located in the Maple Leaf Gardens arena, formerly home of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Ryerson has Canada’s third largest undergraduate engineering school, the George Vari Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science. In addition to offering full-time and part-time undergraduate and graduate programs leading to Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees, the university offers part-time degrees, distance education and certificates through the G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education.

In 1852 at the core of the present main campus, the St. James Square, Egerton Ryerson founded Ontario’s first teacher training facility, the Toronto Normal School. Mr. Ryerson was an educator, politician, and Methodist minister. He is known as the father of Ontario’s public school system.

Egerton Ryerson is also a founder of the first publishing company in Canada in 1829, The Methodist Book and Publishing House, which is today is part of McGraw-Hill Ryerson.

The Toronto Training and Re-establishment Institute was created in 1945 on the former site of the Toronto Normal School at St James Square, bounded by Gerrard, Church, Yonge and Gould. The Gothic-Romanesque building was designed by architects Thomas Ridout and Frederick William Cumberland in 1852.

The Ryerson Institute of Technology was founded in 1948, inheriting the staff and facilities of the Toronto Training and Re-establishment Institute. In 1966, this institution became the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.

Today, Ryerson University offers programs in chemical, civil, mechanical, industrial, electrical, biomedical and computer engineering. The university is also one of only two Canadian universities to offer a program in aerospace engineering accredited by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB). In total, Ryerson offers more than hundred undergraduate and graduate programs.

The Toronto Normal School. The Toronto Normal School, the first provincial institution for the systematic training of elementary school-teachers, was established in 1847 through the initiative of the Reverend Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Schools for Canada West. In 1852 the School was located in Classical Revival style buildings designed for this site by F.W. Cumberland and Thomas Ridout. At first the Normal School had to provide academic instruction for some poorly educated student-teachers, but, increasingly, emphasis was placed on professional training. As a result the Toronto Normal School contributed significantly to the gradual improvement of teaching standards throughout Ontario and became a leading centre for teacher-training. In 1941 the Normal School was moved to a different site and renamed Toronto Teachers’ College in 1952.

The Automotive Guessing Game

The Automotive Guessing Game

Reading your insurer’s mind can save your money

If you’re a 22-year-old male driving a souped-up Porsche, you may want to think about getting married. There’s nothing cheap about a high performance sports car, including insurance premiums, but insurers do give a discount to married sports car enthusiasts under the assumption – based on hard data – that they will get into fewer accidents.

That doesn’t mean you should get married just to get a lower rate, of course, just that auto insurers know more about you than you think. Like anyone that makes a living by gambling, insurance companies make it a point to know the odds. Years of accumulating data on the kinds of people who will get into accidents have allowed them to play the percentages with increasing accuracy.

You can’t change who you are, but it helps to know how insurers make their calculations – that way, you can make a few calculations yourself about how to save on your bill when you, say, buy your next car. Here are some of the basics that insurance companies consider when setting rates.

Prior accident and conviction rate: Most insurers will give a break of 20 percent to 40 percent for maintaining a clean driving record. In California, a 20 percent “good driver” discount is even mandatory.

Your age: According to insurers’ bell curves, drivers between 50 and 64 have the fewest accidents. The peak accident rates are after 75 and (no surprise) at about 16. Marriage, of course, can throw you into an entirely different part of the bell curve.

A car. Illustration by Elena

Choice of car: Insurers tend to charge more for pricey, high-performance vehicles. State Farm and Allstate both publish rankings of cars by their risk category. The Acura Legend, the Ford Explorer SPW, and the GMC Safari van are included on both lists as vehicles with lower-than-standard collision and comprehensive premiums. The BMW 325 and Camaro Z-28, on the other hand, are ranked by Allstate as “much worse than average risks” and rates are higher.

Where you live: The higher the density of vehicles, the more likely you are to have an accident, so cities can be more expensive than suburbs.

Safety devices: Air bags and anti-lock brakes can bring down the cost of insurance by more than 10 percent. Some states, like Florida and New York, require discounts on collision coverage for cars equipped with anti-lock brakes and other safety devices.

Multi-car discounts: When you insure more than one car with the same company, you can sometimes qualify for a 10 percent to 25 percent discount.

Annual mileage: Less time on the road and shorter commutes mean less of a chance of getting into accident.

Good grades: Student who keep a B average can win themselves or their parents a 10 percent to 20 percent discount.

Anti-theft devices: Devices that set themselves automatically are likely to win bigger discounts since insurers know that people sometimes forget to set car alarms. (Do your neighbors a favor, though: don’t set the sensitivity too high. Heavy trucks passing by often can set off the device).

Defensive-driving courses: Most insurance companies will give you a discount for taking a state-approved defensive driving course. Check first; sometimes the discount only applies to drivers over 55.

Playing the Rating Game

Playing the Rating Game

How you can tell which insurance companies have staying power

The financial strength of your insurance company is all the insurance you have that the firm will be around when it’s time for you to collect on a policy. But how can you tell if any one company is financially strong or weak?

Fortunately, you don’t need to spend hours poring over financial statements. Several independent organizations specialize in issuing “ratings” of life insurance companies. You should check a few best-known rating agencies.

Playing the Rating Game. Illustration : Elena

They will analyze a company’s financial strength and overall operations considering factors such as control of expenses, investment performance, claims experience, and management philosophy. They will also focus on the company’s claim-paying ability. They will publish a great deal of data, some of which can be difficult to interpret. They also will issue a simpler overall rating for each company.

It’s often difficult to compare the results of different company’s ratings. The A category alone may include several gradations.

What’s a smart consumer to do? One clue that trouble’s brewing is a drop of two or more ratings over a short period of time. And some experts recommend choosing an insurer that gets A or top B grades from four of the five raters. That’s pretty good insurance that your insurer will be around when needed.

Eyesight by a Thousand Cuts

Eyesight by a Thousand Cuts

A cure for nearsightedness may leave you farsighted

The technique was discovered by a Russian doctor by accident in 1971. Treating a man whose cornea had been cut when his glasses were smashed in a fight, the surgeon Svjatoslav Fyodorov discovered that the patient’s sight had improved.

Fyodorov hypothesized that the scoring of the man’s eye by the shattered glass had flattened the cornea, which is the transparent dome about the thickness of a credit card that covers the front of the eyeball. When a person is nearsighted, or myopic, the eyeball becomes too long, which causes light rays to focus short of the retina, resulting in blurred distant vision.

By flattening the cornea, Fyodorov realized, an eyeball could be restored to a rounder shape, thereby altering its local length so that light focused on the retina itself, eliminating the myopia.

Over the next several years, Fyodorov carefully developed the surgical technique now known as radial keratotomy, in which a series of tiny but deliberate incisions are made in the surface of a patient’s cornea to flatten the eyeball and reduce the nearsightedness.

American surgeons trained by Fyodorov performed the first radial keratotomies here in 1978, and today hundreds of thousands of such operations are performed in the United States annually, at a rather accessible cost. According to a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health over a 10-year period, the technique successfully eliminated nearsightedness in 70 percent of patients, “with a reasonable level of safety.”

Eyesight. Photo by Elena

Of the several hundred patients followed by a decade, about 70 percent had no need for eyeglasses of contact lenses to correct for nearsightedness, 53 percent of the eyes studied had uncorrected vision of 20/20 or better, and 85 percent of the patients could see at 20/40 or better, which is what is required for a driver’s license in most places. Vision-threatening complications occurred in only 3 percent of the cases, and in all but three cases, the eyes could be corrected to 20/25 vision with glasses.

Farsightedness was another matter, however. Ten years after surgery, 43 percent of those whose eyes were studied had become farsighted bu 1.00 D or more. (D stands for diopter, a measure of lens power indicating the need for a new prescription.) In many cases, the study found, the onset of symptomatic presbyopia – a condition where the eye loses natural flexibility – appear to have been accelerated by radial keratotomy, often leading to the need for reading glasses.

One way to offset this drift toward farsightedness is to shorten the lengths of the incisions made in the cornea, the study group concluded. Most of the vision gain from radial keratotomy comes from the incision’s middle portion and not from the edge, and the longer the incisions, the more pronounced the farsightedness is, according to the NIH study.

The shift to farsightedness can be at least partly compensated for by intentionally undercorrecting for myopia in the initial radial keratotomy operation. Over time, the shift toward farsightedness and the undercorrecting for nearsightedness sometimes balance one another out, resulting in virtually normal vision.

Before deciding to get a vision overhaul with radial keratotomy, consider this, however: Once your corneas are slit in the procedure, wearing contact lenses comfortably can be very difficult. That means that if your nearsightedness is not adequately corrected or if you develop complications from the surgery, you are likely to be stuck wearing eyeglasses all the time.

A new treatment also is on the horizon for the nearsighted that leaps into the world of laser surgery. The process, known as photorefractive keratoktemy, uses an excimer laser to flatten the cornea’s contours and erase nearsightedness, the same way radial keratotomy does. The procedure takes 15 to 30 seconds and is appealing because it removes very little tissue – typically less than 10 percent of the cornea’s thickness – and relies more on automation than on the skill of individual surgeons. Approved for use in 35 countries, photorefractive keratectomy was recommended for approval in the United States by an FDA advisory panel late in 1994. The use of laser surgery to treat mild to moderate nearsightedness was approved a year later.

A Shift to Farsighted

A diopter is the unit of measurement of change in one’s vision. A one-diopter change indicates the need for a new eye-wear prescription in the immediate future.

Beware Extended-Wear Contacts

Sleeping with your lenses in can lead to corneal damage

Extended-wear contact lenses, touted for their ability to be worn as long as a week without removal or cleaning, aren’t so carefree, after all, according to several studies. Researches have found that the risks of an infection known as ulcerative keratitis, which causes severe inflammation of the cornea and can lead to permanent vision loss, were twice as great for conventional soft extended-wear users as for daily-wear users. Wearers of disposable lenses, which are designed to be worn without removal for up to two weeks and then thrown out before dirt and debris build up, were 13 times as likely to develop a corneal infection as those who regularly removed their contacts for cleaning.

Researchers writing in Archives of Ophthalmology found that most of the increased risk was the result of extended-wear users keeping their lenses in overnight and not following proper cleaning procedures. From a half to three-quarters of the corneal infections that now develop could be stopped by not wearing disposable lenses overnight, the group argued.

“Even adequate lens care, although recommended, does not protect against the excess risk of overnight wear,” says Dr. Oliver Schein, an ophthalmologist at John Hopkins University and co-author of the study. The message for the five million Americans who now favor the convenience of extended-wear lenses: Remove your lenses and disinfect them while you give your eyes a rest each night.

A Warning to Sunbathers

A Warning to Sunbathers

Being sun smart means knowing your SPFs

It’s hard to pinpoint when America went around the bend in worshiping the bronzed god, but Hollywood no doubt bears a large measure of blame. Even before the movies went Technicolor and George Hamilton and Annette Funicello could prove by their antics that the suntanned really had more fun, moviegoers had already been subjected to years of glamorous Hollywood palm-tree and fun-in-the-sun imagery.

That cinematic fantasy, happily perpetuated by suntan lotion advertising, remains very alive today. According. According to a recent survey for the American Academy of Dermatology, 59 percent of Americans view a tan as a sign of health and find that it enhances appearances.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, a tan is your skin’s way of showing that it’s been damaged by the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Over the years, that damage will not only “age” your skin visibly – causing wrinkles, sags, an the kind of pigmentation changes associated with growing old – but it may even lead to skin cancer.

The key to being “sun smart” is to use a sunscreen on exposed skin whenever you’re outside. To help you choose the appropriate level of protection, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration now requires all sunscreen makers to rate the protective power of each of their products. A sunscreen with a sun-protection factor, or SPF, of two, allows you to stay in the sun without getting burned for twice as long as would otherwise be possible without a screen. An SPF of eight gives you eight times the protection.

In choosing a sunscreen, keep in mind the answers to the following questions:

Is there any difference between a sunscreen and a sunblock?

Yes, there is. Sunscreens are chemically based an allow some ultraviolet light to penetrate the sim no matter what their SPF. True sunblocks use mineral like zinc oxide or titanium dioxide in an opaque cream or paste. They do not carry SPFs because their reflective powers are so complete that they do not allow any light to reach the screen.

Unfortunately, such products leave an unattractive chalky film on your skin. A few manufacturers now market hybrid products that a titanium dioxide to chemically based screens to give them reflective properties that they would not otherwise possess.

How high an SPF should I choose?

Dermatologists advise that use a sunscreen with an SPF of at least 15. This will ensure the filtering out of most UV-B rays, the part of the ultraviolet light spectrum most responsible for sunburn and skin cancer.

Is a sunscreen’s SPF all that I need to worry about?

No. SPF only addresses a sunscreen’s ability to guard against UV-B radiation. Researchers have recently discovered that another kind of ultraviolet radiation, known as UV-A radiation, harms the skin’s connective tissue, resulting in visible aging and contributing to skin cancer in some cases.

What can be done to protect against UV-A radiation?

The best protection comes from sunscreens containing a chemical compound known as avobenzone. Some protection can also be gotten from products that contain oxybenzone, a common ingredient in many sunscreens.

Do I need sunscreen if I’m swimming?

Sunscreen is especially important if you’re swimming. Water magnifies the power of ultraviolet rays, ensuring that you will burn even more quickly in the water than on the beach unless the sunscreen you use is water-resistant. Even if it is, it’s a good idea to reapply it after leaving the water to ensure full protection.

What if I have an allergic reaction to sunscreens?

You should avoid sunscreens that contain that contain PABA (para-aminobenzoic acid). Many people are allergic to PABA, and many sunscreens now state on their package that they’re PABA-free (see How Sunscreens Stack Up, below). If you continue to get an allergic reaction, try the new titanium dioxide-based hybrid screens. They are the least likely to cause irritation.

Heidi Kum. Photo by Elena

How Sunscreens Stack Up

These leading brands of sunscreen are all waterproof

Product – Type – Protection provided – Contains RABA? Other features

Bain de Soleil Tropical Deluxe – Suntan lotion – UV-A – No – Retains its sun protection for at least 80 minutes in the water.

Oppertone Suntan lotion – Suntan lotion – UV-A, UV-B – No – Contains aloe and vitamin E.

Hawai’ian Tropic Sport – Sunblock – UV-A, UV-B – No – Waterproof and sweatproof, lasts 8 hours in the water.

Johnson & Johnson Sundown – Sunblock – UV-A, UV-B – No – Waterproof, lasts 80 minutes in the water. Schering Plough Shade – Sunscreen – UV-A, UV-B – No – Contains Parsol 1789; company claims it gives extra UVA protection.

Solar Suncare N-Ad – Sunscreen – No – Contains aloe, cocoa butter, and vitamin E.