If angels could weep, they surely would, began a Toronto Sun story Sept. 18 about the memorial held for York students Vanessa and Isabel Diceglie, who died following a highway collision last Thursday. There is an angel over each open casket, looking down with alabaster eyes on angelic sisters.
There are angels, too, at the makeshift memorial that grows along the highway where the car of two Brampton sisters was struck by a massive gravel truck — Vannesa Diceglie, dying at the scene as rescuers tried to extract her from the twisted wreckage, sister Isabel dying from trauma two days later at St. Michael’s Hospital, as scores of her young friends held quiet and prayerful vigil with her family.
Peter Diceglie, the girls’ uncle, spoke on behalf of the family because, as he puts it, "It will take them – take us – months to come to terms with this, if ever at all." Both girls were students at York University. Isabel was in the final year of completing her major in French and business management while, Vanessa was in her second year, studying French and drama.
"They were truly exceptional girls," he says. "They were good students and good athletes. They were both lifeguards. They taught autistic kids how to swim. They played hockey and baseball. They were all the things we want from our kids, and this family could not be prouder of them."
In the meantime, the police are doing what police do, said the Sun. "Charges are pending, but we are waiting for the collision investigation report to be completed so we know what the most appropriate charges will be," Const. Linda Kennedy of the Caledon OPP says.
Schulich edged out Ivey for top Canadian spot in Journal ranking
York University’s Schulich School of Business has edged out the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey school as the top Canadian MBA school in this year’s Wall Street Journal ranking, reported Canadian Press Sept. 18. York was 11th in the international poll of corporate recruiters, up from 13th last year. Western slipped to 12th from ninth. The Rotman school at the University of Toronto was 24th, down from 22nd.
Topping the international poll was Spain’s ESADE, with Switzerland’s International Institute for Management Development taking second place and the London Business School in third.
At the top of the US national ranking was Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, followed by the Haas school at the University of California, Berkeley and New York’s Columbia University, said CP.
- The Wall Street Journal ‘s 2007 international scorecard of business schools is based on where corporate recruiters like to hire MBA graduates, reported The Globe and Mail Sept. 18. The Journal, which partners with Harris Interactive, bases its report entirely on a survey of 4,430 recruiters taken between Dec. 19, 2006 and March 23, 2007. Programs are rated on 21 attributes, including faculty and career services. The results are sliced into three categories: a US national ranking, led this year by Dartmouth College (Harvard is No. 14); a US regional ranking; and the international ranking, based on schools that draw recruiters for a lot of non-US jobs.
Plagiarism shocker: It’s easier than you think to steal ideas
With a new school term now truly underway, students are looking at looming deadlines and those who turn in papers and reports not of their own creation face visits to the dean, suspension and, in some cases, expulsion, reported the Toronto Star Sept. 18. Even scarier, perhaps, are studies showing how easy it is to inadvertently steal other’s ideas. Neuropsychologist Tobi Lubinsky suspects that while the phenomenon is reviled, it’s also "more common than we’re aware of."
Many people have committed, or have been victims of, unconscious plagiarism. It’s done unknowingly – that is, until your chanteuse girlfriend says you took her bon mots. It happens when we mistake memories of another person’s notions as new ideas of our own. York University’s Lubinsky, who just completed her PhD dissertation on source memory in adults who are at a transition stage between normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease, says people make fewer source memory errors when they have less to remember, and also when told to remember sources.
Happier memories of Vanier
In an essay exhorting Kingstonians to relax about the "drunken Queen’s war machine of fearless, car-flipping barbarians" and their wild street parties, York grad Ben Rutledge (BA ’00) remembered his undergraduate days in Vanier College. "I grew up near Hamilton’s McMaster University, and for me Mac students were always just big kids with beer and no curfew. But when it came time to choose a school, I passed on Mac and went to York University. I was ready to raise hell, and my parents did not want front-row seats."
"I lived in Vanier residence for three years," wrote Rutledge. "When my first-year roommate told me he was not there to socialize, I had four words for him: ‘I’m here to party.’ And party I did. Along the way, I met the girl who would introduce me to my wife, the guy who would be the best man at my wedding and a few other people whose company I have cherished for more than a decade."
Rutledge observed: "When I think of Vanier now, the place where so many of my happiest memories took place, all I can imagine is locked doors and terrified teenage girls going in groups to the washroom. Their memories of school will be fundamentally different than mine."