Any skier who has ever endured limb-numbing cold knows how extreme weather affects athletic performance.
SFU kinesiologist Matthew White is internationally known for his research into athletic performance in extreme environments. In 2008, his team helped prepare Olympic athletes to compete in Beijing’s hot and humid conditions.
This time around White is investigating how to help athletes combat the cold to maintain peak performance. There are great visuals here including a hypo/hyperbaric chamber capable of dives to depths of 300 m or flights to altitudes of 33.5 km; a climate chamber capable of temperatures between -25 to +50 C; and hot/cold immersion tanks.
White can also show you his lab’s latest invention—a portable breath-monitoring-and-manipulation device that is making it easier for researchers to replicate the conditions in extreme environments. Called an End-Tidal Forcing (ETF) system, the invention mimics air conditions in extreme environments by delivering various levels of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and normal air into a volunteer’s lungs.
Colleague Andrew Blaber looks at the effects of high altitude on athletes.
Vancouver—consistently ranked one of the world’s most livable cities—will be in the international spotlight during the 2010 Winter Games. With its gifts of location, mild weather, and jaw-dropping landscapes, Vancouver is constantly ranked among the world’s most livable cities. But how much of that reputation is nature and how much is nurture?
Gordon Price, a former Vancouver city councilor and director of SFU’s City Program credits “Vancouverism”—an innovative and widely lauded urban design movement that strives to make dense-living desirable.
By rejecting intra-city freeways and promoting transportation alternatives, the city has managed to do the unimaginable: increase population while decreasing car traffic, resulting in what Price dubs a “post-motordom” city.
Price studies city heritage and has a particular focus on a city’s evolution: in the case of Vancouver, how a village on the edge of a rainforest became an international model for livability in just over 100 years.
It's ain't the motion, it's the mood—at least when it comes to podium-worth athletic performance. SFU psychologist Mario Liotti, working with Swim Canada colleague Hap Davis, says earning a 2010 medal has as much to do with mental outlook as it does with physical conditioning. He says mood—along with brain activity and hormonal changes associated with success or failure—can have critical roles in determining future competitive outcomes. And harnessing those changes to the best possible advantage is becoming key to an athlete’s coaching team.
When international theatrical sensation Robert Lepage opens his multi-media production of The Blue Dragon/Le Dragon Bleu during the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, he’ll help shine a spotlight on one of the most innovative community-restoration projects in North America.
The massive new Woodward’s redevelopment, located in the gritty Downtown Eastside on the site of a once-popular department store, includes SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts, studio and retail space, market housing—and 200 social housing units for low-income singles and families.
Just about everyone with something to sell wants to get their product or service in front of the billions who are expected to tune in to the Olympics. But for companies that aren't official Games sponsors--and there are about 70 that have paid more than $750 million for the privilege--it will come down to stealth marketing.
SFU Business professor Lindsay Meredith says there's "a delicate dance" going on between VANOC enforcers and advertisers wanting to profit from the Games: "If an interloper attaches themselves somehow to the event, it takes away the sanctity of being official. Down the line, these organizers have to go back to sponsors because there is London in 2012 and others they need to sign up."
Like the International Olympic Committee, Canada is officially bilingual (English and French). But in 2009, a Parliamentary committee noted fewer and fewer young people in Canada are bilingual—while Canada needs 5,000 new bilingual public servants every year.
SFU does more than its share to provide bilingual graduates—and to meet a critical shortage of French-language teachers.
Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages highlights SFU’s unique four-year French Cohort Program in public administration, taught primarily in French. And SFU now can give students access to Canada School of Public Service online language-training products.
SFU’s Faculty of Education trains teachers of “Core French” and French immersion, and offers a Doctorate in Educational Leadership, in French. As well, SFU’s Department of French offers undergraduate and Master’s programs.
Canada’s Aboriginal heritage infuses every aspect of the 2010 Olympics, from the inuksuk logo and official “authentic” souvenirs to venues featuring First Nations themes and rituals.
While it’s a source of pride for both Native and non-Native Canadians, it has also generated concerns over intellectual property rights and how Aboriginal communities worldwide can best protect their cultural legacies.
SFU archaeology professor George Nicholas is leading a $2.5-million, seven-year international project that examines who has the right to benefit from “the past.”
The project, International Property Issues in Cultural Heritage, is looking at new systems for protecting and sharing cultural heritage information—a process that will benefit many different groups including aboriginal communities, scientific organizations and government agencies.
Nicholas says the project aims to develop guidelines so that indigenous peoples no longer see “their practices, their imagery, their stories, their songs—these intangible components—absorbed in ways that don’t benefit them.”
SFU will open its downtown buildings to the world during the 2010 Winter Games, with revenues to go toward much-needed building repairs and renovations:
Note: While all SFU campuses will remain open during the Olympics, there will be no scheduled classes.
More than 200,000 people during the Winter Olympics are expected to tour Simon Fraser University’s West House, a model sustainable home at LiveCity in Yaletown, featuring the latest in green-building, clean-energy and smart-home control technologies. It can even tell you if there's enough juice to run the vacuum cleaner. Press Release
A new educational website developed by 7th Floor Media at Simon Fraser University in partnership with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre looks at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin—a watershed moment in the rise of Nazi Germany and Canada’s first serious encounter with Hitler’s totalitarian regime. See http://www.vhec.org/1936_olympics/