Fun and games were the order of the day Tuesday as UWindsor students participated in a variety of activities meant to engage them in campus life. Students Orienting Students gave away hundreds of hotdogs and hamburgers during a free barbecue lunch held in conjunction with Adrenaline Rush, which featured everything from an inflatable obstacle course to a Minute to Win It-style competition.

Today's Windsor Welcome Week events are a little more academic, starting with Program Orientation, mandatory for first-year students in all courses of study. New this year is Turf Talk on the lawn outside Dillon Hall, three 40-minute sessions offering wisdom from upper-year students: “41 Things All First Year Students Should Know” at 9:45 a.m. “Make Your Money Work For You” at 10:30 a.m. and “Decode Your Professors” at 11:15 a.m.

Welcoming Celebration at 3 p.m. in the St. Denis Centre will distribute a pair of UWindsor sunglasses to each new student and explain why “The Future's so Bright You Gotta Wear Shades.” One lucky winner will receive a semester’s free tuition from the Alumni Association.

A reception for mature students to discuss balancing the demands of school, family and work is scheduled for Alumni Hall's McPherson Lounge at 5:30 p.m. At the same time, buses will leave from the St. Denis Centre for a scenic boat cruise along the Detroit River.

Other events this week include:

• Thursday, September 8. First day of classes. Grab some freebies at the all-day Vendor Fair in the CAW Student Centre courtyard, and check out the play Single & Sexy hosted by the Campus Safety Audit Committee, the School of Dramatic Art, and the Educational Development Centre, at 7 p.m. in the St. Denis Centre.
• Friday, September 9. Join the Campus Community Clean-up, tour some nearby eateries to get a Taste of Windsor, and Bring Your Own Toga to an all-ages party in the Thirsty Scholar.
• Saturday, September 10. Shinerama Shine Day: from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., UWindsor students will participate in the largest post-secondary fundraiser in Canada, taking their shoe-shining skills to the streets of Windsor to benefit cystic fibrosis charities.

Visit www.windsorwelcomeweek.ca for a full list of events, locations and times.

What well-dressed Windsorites will wear this winter: Syed Binish Hassan and Marina Trajkovska model appropriate cold-weather garb as part of a showcase of Canadian fashions during International Student Orientation in the CAW Student Centre on Tuesday.

Students Orienting Students: Volunteers handed out hundreds of hotdogs and hamburgers to hungry students participating in campus activities Tuesday.

First-year psychology student Natalie Franco completes a pass at one of the games outside Dillon Hall.

New UWindsor students Dilkash Kaur Singh, Soham Singh and Seema Antil dance before the PopNoggins green screen. The company superimposes clients' faces on animated figures.

Campus camp: A teepee joins student tents in the residence quad overnight Sunday. First-year behaviour, cognition and neuroscience major Roger Reka called the sleepover an interesting way to meet new people.

Fawad Ahmed hopes the result of his summer labour will be far fewer people contracting pneumonia after they’re admitted to an intensive care unit.

Under the direction of nursing professor and faculty research leadership chair Maher El-Masri, who specializes in hospital-acquired infections, Ahmed spent the summer studying past cases of ventilator associated pneumonia at Windsor Regional Hospital.
 
“People in ICU are usually very sick and can’t control their own breathing so they need to be ventilated,” explained Ahmed, who enters his third year at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry – Windsor Program this fall. “When you run a tube down someone’s throat there’s a greater risk for bacteria to enter.”

Safer Healthcare Now!, the flagship program of the Canadian Patient Safety Institute, tries to improve patient safety by implementing preventative measures known to  reduce avoidable harm. Over the past decade, the organization incrementally introduced various protocols to help reduce these pneumonias. Some of those include raising the head of the bed, improved mouth hygiene to prevent colonization of bacteria and temporarily interrupting sedation to conduct spontaneous breathing trials.

Ahmed is doing a retrospective study on ICU patients at Windsor Regional from 2006 to 2010. He spent the summer looking back at all the records of patients who were admitted during that time, determining who received which measures in order to figure out the most effective ones for preventing ventilator associated pneumonia.

“It’s a neat study because it’s never been done before,” said Ahmed, who noted that Windsor Regional already has a good record of preventing the disease. “It will help policy makers and health care professionals take better care of their patients in the ICU.”

Ahmed, who received a grant from the Summer Research Opportunity Program to study the issue, said the medical school here has an atmosphere that’s very conducive for students to conduct research. However, his interest and passion for research was originally ignited by Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research geneticist Dan Heath, who he worked with on studying the DNA of Chinook salmon while still an undergrad in biology.

“I really learned a lot,” said Ahmed, who grew up in Windsor and attended W.F. Herman Secondary School. “If I was anywhere else, I never would have got the chance.”

Ahmed made a number of trips to the hospital this summer and got to interact with respiratory therapists and other health care professionals. Although he hasn’t decided on a specialty for when he begins his residency, the hospital experience has him leaning towards internal medicine because he discovered he loves working with patients as well as other health care providers.

Editor's note: this is one of a series of articles about students from across campus who were engaged in cool research projects and other activities during the summer.

Feminists criticize the extent to which logic and other models for argumentation eliminate important contextual elements and force specific interpretations as if they were neutral, says philosophy professor Catherine Hundleby.

She will explore the subject in a free public lecture entitled "Feminism and Argumentation" on Thursday, September 8, at 3 p.m. in the seminar room of Parker House, 105 Sunset Avenue.

"Treating argumentation as an adversarial practice of opposing other people or at least other opinions is common, especially influential in the discipline of philosophy," Dr. Hundleby says. "And through philosophy it affects broadly accepted standards for reasoning and reinforces patriarchal discourse."

This talk is presented by the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric (CRRAR).

Today’s DailyNews quiz features questions about writers who are associated with the University of Windsor. The prize, courtesy of the Alumni Affairs office, is a jute bag perfect for carrying books by these authors—or anybody, really.

The winner will be randomly selected from all correct responses received by 4 p.m. Wednesday, September 7. To be eligible, select the most correct answer to each of the following questions:

1. Playwright David French served as writer in residence in 2007. Which of his plays has been staged by the University Players?
   a) Leaving Home
   b) Jitters
   c) Salt-Water Moon
   d) That Summer
   e) All of the above
   .
2. Before publishing his acclaimed first novel No Great Mischief in 1999, creative writing professor emeritus Alistair MacLeod published two short story collections, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and this book:
   a) As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories
   b) Island
   c) The Road to Rankin’s Point
   d) To Everything There Is a Season
   e) None of the above
   .
3. W.O. Mitchell was at the University Windsor from 1978 to 1987, during which time he published which of these books?
   a) Who Has Seen the Wind
   b) The Vanishing Point
   c) How I Spent My Summer Holidays
   d) According to Jake and the Kid
   e) All of the above
   .
4. Joyce Carol Oates taught in the English department from 1968 to 1978. Which one of her works was both nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and adapted into an opera?
   a) Black Water
   b) Broke Heart Blues
   c) What I Lived For
   d) Wonderland
   e) All of the above
   .
5. Nino Ricci, 2005 writer in residence, won his second Governor General’s Award for Fiction for The Origin of Species. Which of his novels earned his first GG?
   a) In a Glass House
   b) Lives of the Saints
   c) Testament
   d) Where She has Gone
   e) None of the above

Contest is open to all readers of the DailyNews. Send an e-mail with your responses to uofwnews@uwindsor.ca. One entry per contestant, please. Note: the decision of the judge in determining the most correct response is inviolable.

Contest winner knows Windsor buses

Sean Moriarty, acting executive director of  Information Technology Services, won yesterday's contest. His name was drawn from all entrants who correctly responded that Canada’s first electric street railway began operation in Windsor in 1886; that Transit Windsor was previously known as the  Sandwich, Windsor & Amherstburg Railway; and that the 1C, 2 and 7 bus routes stop adjacent to the UWindsor campus. Moriarty will receive the prize of a zippered mini-padfolio provided by the Alumni Office.

Campus flags will be lowered Wednesday, September 7,, in memory of retired professor of civil engineering Maurice Powley, who died September 3. He joined the University of Windsor faculty in 1968 and retired in 1990.

Cremation has taken place, and the family has planned a private funeral for Wednesday.