St. FX University’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing – Accelerated Option Program Exceeds Enrollment Target

Science and Health

This month 48 new students entered the Bachelor of Science in Nursing – Accelerated Option (AO) program at St. FX, which the university describes as an innovative and responsive program that educates baccalaureate-prepared nurses.  That exceeds the enrollment target set by the university’s Rankin School of Nursing.
StFX continues to contribute to the health of Nova Scotia, including exceeding its enrollment target for the Rankin School of Nursing BSc in Nursing – Accelerated Option (AO) program – getting more nurses into the healthcare profession faster. In January 2025, 48 new students entered the AO program, an innovative and responsive program that educates baccalaureate-prepared nurses. AO students pictured here are, l-r, Eva Boyd, Meghan Hershey, Kyle Prinoski and Arial Benoit. (St. FX University photo)
StFX’s AO program, which began in 2017, allows students with the required post-secondary credits the opportunity to earn their degree over 24 continuous months. STFX states the program offers the same nursing education as StFX’s regular four year BScN program but it progresses at a faster, uninterrupted pace that allows graduates to enter or re-enter the workforce sooner.
Rankin School of Nursing Associate Dean, Dr. Amy Hallaran said this is the first year they have a full cohort starting in January.

Scientists want microplastics monitored in the Great Lakes. Now, it’s up to the U.S. and Canada

Science and Health

Scientists want the U.S. and Canada to designate microplastics as a “chemical of mutual concern.”The recommendation is part of a new report on how to monitor microplastics in the Great Lakes, released by the Great Lakes Science Advisory Board at the International Joint Commission, an organization that helps the U.S. and Canada tackle water quality issues together.“The Great Lakes have a lot of microplastic. There’s absolutely no doubt,” said Chelsea Rochman, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of Toronto and an author of the report. “The amount of microplastics that I see in urban areas — for example, in Toronto — is striking. It is much higher than I see in the open ocean, or even in the ocean in urban areas. And the amount that we see in our fish, including in our sport fish, is also striking.”The designation would add microplastics to a list of contaminants like PCBs and mercury that both countries are required to monitor under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.“We have a lot of policies on both sides of the border,” Rochman said. “But we can do better, specifically for microplastics.”Microplastic particles can negatively impact aquatic organisms, ranging from stress on an organism’s diet to its reproductive system. Emerging research also shows that microplastics can leach toxic chemicals into organisms.”We see hundreds of particles in the gut of an individual fish here in the Toronto Harbor … and we also see tens or dozens of particles in the muscle, which is the filet, the part that we eat,” Rochman said. “We also know that the concentrations we see in some parts of the Great Lakes are above those that we consider to be a threshold for risk, meaning that the organisms now in our Great Lakes are exposed to levels that could be harmful.”

Figure from the Final Report of the International Joint Commission Great Lakes Science Advisory Board Work Group on Microplastics. (Image: International Joint Commission)

But there’s currently no coordinated regional effort to monitor microplastics across the Great Lakes. That would change if microplastics are added to the binational list of contaminants.The new report lays out a framework for making widespread monitoring possible, like a standardized definition of microplastics and standardized methods for sampling and reporting microplastic pollution.Right now, most data comes from piecemeal research across different academic institutions.“If we’re all sampling in the same way and doing the analysis in the same way … we can compare apples to apples, as opposed to trying to compare apples to oranges,” Rochman said. “If we’re monitoring in such a way that’s not standardized, it’s possible the data won’t have the same trust … as we make decisions that may change how businesses operate, how people operate, et cetera.”The report provides the tools to run long-term, consistent microplastics monitoring programs as opposed to the disparate data that come from academia.Officials from the U.S. and Canada first began considering adding microplastics to the list of “chemicals of mutual concern” in 2023. There’s no timeline for when they’ll make a decision.Funding for much of the work of monitoring pollutants on the U.S. side of the border comes from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. That money is approved through 2026. An extension of that funding through 2031 has passed the U.S. Senate but still needs House approval.On Feb. 12, the International Joint Commission Great Lakes Science Advisory Board will hold a public webinar to discuss their report on the state of science on microplastics. Register here.

‘Presence’ review: Immersive movie sees dysfunctional family from a ghost’s P.O.V.

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

Steven Soderbergh’s innovative and immersive “Presence” is a ghost story that would have worked just as well without the ghost. Everything we witness in this film is literally seen through the P.O.V. of a spectral presence, but it’s the machinations of a deeply dysfunctional nuclear family that makes it all so intriguing. If the prolific Soderbergh and the greatly talented screenwriter David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “Panic Room,” “Mission: Impossible”) had told this tale via conventional methods, I have no doubt it would have had the same level of impact.The entirety of “Presence” takes place within the walls of a gorgeous, warmly appointed, 100-year-old home in an undefined suburb. (It could be next door to the house in the even more gimmicky Tom Hanks/Robin Wright film “Here.”) Soderbergh, who is also cinematographer and editor, places us inside the “character” of some sort of ghostly presence who occupies the house, zipping about in long tracking shots, using a fade-to-black technique to transition from one day to the next. (Hmmm, given the visual style, maybe this is the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock!)In the opening sequence, the ghost moves freely about the unoccupied home, allowing us to take in the rich wood paneling, the open and welcoming kitchen, the staircase leading up to the bedrooms and the view from the living room windows. The house is up for sale, with Julia Fox delivering a vibrant cameo as the real estate agent who seals the deal with the very first clients to see the place.

‘Presence’

It’s the control-freak mother, Rebekah (Lucy Liu), who makes the call, in large part because the house is in a great school district for her competitive swimming star son Tyler (Eddie Maday). We can see from the get-go that Rebekah’s husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) is a living, breathing afterthought in Rebekah’s world, who also and quite clearly favors Tyler over their daughter Chloe (Callina Laing), a sensitive girl who is in mourning and feeling broken and lost after her best friend died of a drug overdose.It quickly becomes evident that this is one effed-up family. Rebekah has some sort of high-finance, high-pressure job and it seems as if she’s been engaging in some potentially illegal activities, which she rationalizes by saying she’ll do anything, ANYTHING, in order for her son to have the best opportunities in life. Chris is stressed out by all the tension in the house, what with Rebekah barely acknowledging his presence, golden boy Tyler displaying an alarming mean streak and Chloe spiraling into an emotional wreck. (A scene in which Tyler recounts what he thinks is a hilarious episode of horrific bullying reinforces our feelings that Rebekah enables Tyler’s terrible behavior, Chloe is rightfully repulsed by her brother, and Chris is a weak-willed milquetoast who allows Rebekah to walk all over him, because he has always felt she’s completely out of his league.)

Chris (Chris Sullivan) is hesitant to challenge his control-freak wife Rebekah (Lucy Liu) in “Presence.”

With screenwriter Koepp (who collaborated with Soderbergh on the similarly claustrophobic and quite terrific Zoë Kravitz vehicle “Kimi” in 2022) deftly sprinkling in little details about the family’s day-to-day existence, e.g., they never cook and every single meal they have is takeout, and it’s the intuitive Chloe who first becomes aware of the ghost in the house, who she believes might be the spirit of her deceased best friend.The ghost begins to toy with her by moving items about her bedroom, closing doors, making things shake as if there’s a minor earthquake, even blowing a cold breath in her direction. Eventually, though, it seems as if the ghost is becoming protective of Chloe, especially when she gets involved with a handsome and brooding jock named Ryan (West Mulholland) who keeps telling Chloe she’s in charge of the relationship even as he manipulates her in increasingly insidious fashion.

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By now you’re quite likely wondering how any of this makes for a frightening movie, what with us seeing everything from the ghost’s point of view. “Presence” does have a few effective jump scares, including one goosebump-inducing moment late in the story, but the more we get to know the ghost — and I know that sounds weird, but we do feel like we come to know him/her/it/they/them — the more we feel a sense of empathy for this being. Like the Beast in “Beauty and the Beast” or the Phantom of the Opera, this ghost seems to be a kind of tragic anti-hero, trapped in this house, suspended in some sort of in between-world, bearing witness to a modern American family that should be grateful for all the gifts life has given them but is falling apart at the seams. That’s the real horror of “Presence.”

Brady Corbet: ‘It’s a fucking film’

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

The maverick writer/director espouses the need to stick behind your aesthetic and creative ideals at all costs.Over six years in the making, three and a half hours long shot on 70mm with a 15-minute intermission and focused on a Hungarian architect escaping the terror of 20th century fascism for a new life in America – The Brutalist ticks a lot of arthouse epic boxes. It sounds like the sort of film that social media blowhards joke about film bros loving, and yet Brady Corbet’s third feature, co-written with his wife Mona Fastvold, is an elegant, searching, bracingly human experience, anchored by Adrien Brody’s magnificent turn as Lázsló Tóth and Corbet’s singular vision. But, as Corbet explains, mounting a film as truly ambitious as The Brutalist was an architectural feat in itself.
Brady Corbet: “This is the longest film that I’ve ever made, and I’ve had to watch it from start to finish many, many more times than I have any other film. I’m supervising the creation of all of the 35 and 70 millimeter prints, and then because it’s an organic process. No one except maybe my editor, knows the film quite as obsessively as I do, and so things happen: there’s a dropped frame, there’s some other issue. Then you have to start over and make a new reel. It’s a lot of work – and I realized that I couldn’t really get a sense of the rhythm and flow of the entire movie unless I started at the beginning, which was so, so annoying. I am truly sick of it. [laughs] I think that you spend so many years dwelling on these themes, on this process, and I just can’t wait to have a little bit of mental space free up.
Also I just need a rest. My wife and I wrote a musical that she was directing this summer, and I directed all the second unit for it, and Daniel, our composer, he wrote all the songs – it’s about the Shakers, about Anne Lee emigrating from Manchester to the United States in the 18th century – and it was a really grueling job as well. Normally, we don’t have this level of overlap with projects, and because I was still in full-on post-production, I was mixing and grading and doing the network grade and supervising the print at the same time that I was shooting for her and producing her movie with her…it was really a lot, and then I expected this film to be released six to nine months after we premiered, because, it didn’t seem like the type of movie that anybody would be in a real rush to put out, but then all of a sudden it became very clear that the best time really was now.
And I’m very grateful that people are covering The Brutalist, because I genuinely believe that if the film does even just okay, commercially speaking, that it’s a huge win. The movie was not made for very much money, so for it to sort of justify itself, and erase our debt, we don’t have to do crazy numbers. Then maybe people will think, Oppenheimer at three hours long was not a fluke.
At the start of the summer, before anyone had seen it, they heard the movie was three and a half hours long and it was like a bullet to the head. But Oppenheimer, regardless of how people felt about it, it was an extremely good thing for the movie industry. And I think it would be really great to recognise there’s still an audience for movies about adults, for adults – movies that really have something on their mind. I really struggle with how many of the folks that have the power to green light a project operate from a place of fear, because the issue is that, as a result of fewer people going to the cinemas, everyone has become especially risk averse. It becomes a very vicious cycle where people also stop showing up for things because there’s nothing original for them to show up for.
And as a parent with no savings account, I can say that even for us, going to see a film in the theater is a choice. By the time we pay for a taxi, pay for child care, get dinner, concessions, whatever – it’s expensive. So I really feel like it needs to be an event, like it needs to be something that demands to be seen on the big screen. I would just want to do everything I possibly can to help that experience along, because, as a fellow cinephile, I think that it’s quite frightening. And also what we experienced during COVID, the idea that we could lose so many of these institutions, was really upsetting.
I spent so many years genuinely concerned that Kodak would go out of business, because when it comes to celluloid, there are certain fixed costs with manufacturing the stock in particular, that they just can’t do it for less. Kodak is so great about working with filmmakers to try and make it work. And the thing that’s so psychotic is that film on this movie accounted for maybe 1.5% or so of our film’s total gross budget. So I think it’s kind of insane that you have to defend this line item all the time, which is the film. I find it so weird. Why would we prioritize anything before the film itself? It’s a fucking film. It goes to film festivals, you know, it’s the Motion Picture Academy of Film.
So many people in Hollywood have very liberal politics, and yet they have a very conservative response to anything cultural. And for me, these things are not separate. For me, it’s equivalent to canned vegetables being served in schools all over America, where I’m like, of course these kids don’t like their vegetables, because they’ve never had a fresh vegetable. They don’t know what it is. I find it insane that so few people seem to see the direct link between what happens to the culture when you are poisoning them all the time. I thought liberals were supposed to be liberal, and right now, in every way, it feels like liberals are more conservative than they’ve ever been historically.
But to say something that’s a little bit less cynical, I love that the medium of film brings me together with people of all different backgrounds, all different ages. I have real relationships and I’m able to work frequently with people that are in their 70s or 80s, on every aspect of the movie, whether it’s the camera team or we’re making the score with. That is the one aspect of it which I find rather life affirming because it’s easy to dwell on all of the obstructionists that make it very, very difficult to make a movie. But that actually is the exception to the rule. Almost every movie has an antagonist – sometimes there’s multiple antagonists – but I think that overall, out of the 300 people that are contributing their time to these projects, most have their heart in the right place, and are all working towards a common goal, which is something you dreamt up in your bedroom. That is pretty moving and never lost on me and I don’t take it for granted.”
Published 22 Jan 2025

Tags:
Brady Corbet
The Brutalist

Brady Corbet: ‘It’s a fucking film’

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

The maverick writer/director espouses the need to stick behind your aesthetic and creative ideals at all costs.Over six years in the making, three and a half hours long shot on 70mm with a 15-minute intermission and focused on a Hungarian architect escaping the terror of 20th century fascism for a new life in America – The Brutalist ticks a lot of arthouse epic boxes. It sounds like the sort of film that social media blowhards joke about film bros loving, and yet Brady Corbet’s third feature, co-written with his wife Mona Fastvold, is an elegant, searching, bracingly human experience, anchored by Adrien Brody’s magnificent turn as Lázsló Tóth and Corbet’s singular vision. But, as Corbet explains, mounting a film as truly ambitious as The Brutalist was an architectural feat in itself.
Brady Corbet: “This is the longest film that I’ve ever made, and I’ve had to watch it from start to finish many, many more times than I have any other film. I’m supervising the creation of all of the 35 and 70 millimeter prints, and then because it’s an organic process. No one except maybe my editor, knows the film quite as obsessively as I do, and so things happen: there’s a dropped frame, there’s some other issue. Then you have to start over and make a new reel. It’s a lot of work – and I realized that I couldn’t really get a sense of the rhythm and flow of the entire movie unless I started at the beginning, which was so, so annoying. I am truly sick of it. [laughs] I think that you spend so many years dwelling on these themes, on this process, and I just can’t wait to have a little bit of mental space free up.
Also I just need a rest. My wife and I wrote a musical that she was directing this summer, and I directed all the second unit for it, and Daniel, our composer, he wrote all the songs – it’s about the Shakers, about Anne Lee emigrating from Manchester to the United States in the 18th century – and it was a really grueling job as well. Normally, we don’t have this level of overlap with projects, and because I was still in full-on post-production, I was mixing and grading and doing the network grade and supervising the print at the same time that I was shooting for her and producing her movie with her…it was really a lot, and then I expected this film to be released six to nine months after we premiered, because, it didn’t seem like the type of movie that anybody would be in a real rush to put out, but then all of a sudden it became very clear that the best time really was now.
And I’m very grateful that people are covering The Brutalist, because I genuinely believe that if the film does even just okay, commercially speaking, that it’s a huge win. The movie was not made for very much money, so for it to sort of justify itself, and erase our debt, we don’t have to do crazy numbers. Then maybe people will think, Oppenheimer at three hours long was not a fluke.
At the start of the summer, before anyone had seen it, they heard the movie was three and a half hours long and it was like a bullet to the head. But Oppenheimer, regardless of how people felt about it, it was an extremely good thing for the movie industry. And I think it would be really great to recognise there’s still an audience for movies about adults, for adults – movies that really have something on their mind. I really struggle with how many of the folks that have the power to green light a project operate from a place of fear, because the issue is that, as a result of fewer people going to the cinemas, everyone has become especially risk averse. It becomes a very vicious cycle where people also stop showing up for things because there’s nothing original for them to show up for.
And as a parent with no savings account, I can say that even for us, going to see a film in the theater is a choice. By the time we pay for a taxi, pay for child care, get dinner, concessions, whatever – it’s expensive. So I really feel like it needs to be an event, like it needs to be something that demands to be seen on the big screen. I would just want to do everything I possibly can to help that experience along, because, as a fellow cinephile, I think that it’s quite frightening. And also what we experienced during COVID, the idea that we could lose so many of these institutions, was really upsetting.
I spent so many years genuinely concerned that Kodak would go out of business, because when it comes to celluloid, there are certain fixed costs with manufacturing the stock in particular, that they just can’t do it for less. Kodak is so great about working with filmmakers to try and make it work. And the thing that’s so psychotic is that film on this movie accounted for maybe 1.5% or so of our film’s total gross budget. So I think it’s kind of insane that you have to defend this line item all the time, which is the film. I find it so weird. Why would we prioritize anything before the film itself? It’s a fucking film. It goes to film festivals, you know, it’s the Motion Picture Academy of Film.
So many people in Hollywood have very liberal politics, and yet they have a very conservative response to anything cultural. And for me, these things are not separate. For me, it’s equivalent to canned vegetables being served in schools all over America, where I’m like, of course these kids don’t like their vegetables, because they’ve never had a fresh vegetable. They don’t know what it is. I find it insane that so few people seem to see the direct link between what happens to the culture when you are poisoning them all the time. I thought liberals were supposed to be liberal, and right now, in every way, it feels like liberals are more conservative than they’ve ever been historically.
But to say something that’s a little bit less cynical, I love that the medium of film brings me together with people of all different backgrounds, all different ages. I have real relationships and I’m able to work frequently with people that are in their 70s or 80s, on every aspect of the movie, whether it’s the camera team or we’re making the score with. That is the one aspect of it which I find rather life affirming because it’s easy to dwell on all of the obstructionists that make it very, very difficult to make a movie. But that actually is the exception to the rule. Almost every movie has an antagonist – sometimes there’s multiple antagonists – but I think that overall, out of the 300 people that are contributing their time to these projects, most have their heart in the right place, and are all working towards a common goal, which is something you dreamt up in your bedroom. That is pretty moving and never lost on me and I don’t take it for granted.”
Published 22 Jan 2025

Tags:
Brady Corbet
The Brutalist