York University installed its first 5-megawatt cogeneration unit in the fall of 1998 and installed a second in 2003, wrote the Kingston Whig-Standard Oct. 13 in a story about the start-up of a similar unit built by Kingston General Hospital and Queen’s University. "They have been saving us money since they were turned on," said Steven Fraser, director of maintenance, utilities & energy management at York. "It's an energy-efficient way to produce electricity and, as a byproduct, heat the buildings." The cogeneration units also reduce the demand for energy in Ontario, Fraser said. York now produces 60 per cent of its own electricity and 70 per cent of the steam it requires to heat the University. "If we didn't create our own electricity, we would have to buy that off the grid and energy suppliers would have to produce it," he said. "It helps reduce the load coming off the grid."
Late York alumnus studied Anglo-Saxon England
Nicholas Howe (BA ‘74), a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading scholar of Anglo-Saxon England, died of complications from leukemia on Sept. 27 at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland, Calif., the university said in a media release Oct. 12. He was 53. His works include "The Old English Catalogue Poems: A Study in Poetic Form," and the influential "Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England," which opened up new ways of looking at Old English literature and culture. Howe's new book, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography, will be published by Yale University Press in 2007.
Howe earned his BA in English at York University in Toronto in 1974 and his PhD in English from Yale in 1978. He was appointed assistant professor in Rutgers University's English Department in 1978, then left to become an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma in 1985. In 1991, he became full professor at Ohio State, where he became director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, which he built into a nationally recognized program.
Beating victim, now York student, applauds new crime move
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's proposal to make it easier to designate violent criminals as dangerous offenders so they can be kept locked up longer will send a deterrent message to some, reported the Toronto Star Oct. 13. Jonathan Wamback, who was severely beaten and left for dead by a group of teens in Toronto in June 1999, said he is thrilled with Harper's action. Wamback was just 15 when he was left brain-damaged and told he would never walk again. Today, Wamback can walk and is a student at York University.
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- Sergei Plekhanov