Leaderboard

I attended the Funeral service for Jan Foster in Calgary last week and was reminded of the contribution to Paramedicine that she made in Calgary and Canada. She was the first co-ordinator and instructor for the original EMT program at SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology) in 1972 and continued in that position for 16 years. There was NO other program in Canada, so she was required to set the curriculum and standards that evolved into the Paramedic programs of today. Her background was nursing and she was always voicing a concern of how the ambulance attendants brought patients into the ER. When the program was conceived and a posting went out to hire some-one to set up and administer it, she applied and went to work. After the funeral, many Paramedics that were in her 1st, 2nd and in my 3rd year classes got a chance to visit and remember what it was that started all this paramedical stuff. We are amazed at how much it has changed and how much it has stayed the same. Some of us have been working continually for over 40 years. Jan Foster brought her professionalism into the class room and that ideal has remained to this day. Jan Foster would be considered "THE MOTHER OF PARAMEDICINE" in Canada by all those that knew her.

I know we agree on little, and that I know that I have made many of you curse in 2009, but I still want to wish each and everyone of you a Happy Thanksgiving. I hope all of you have the chance to celebrate Thanksgiving in a way that brings you and your family closer together. Eat too much, laugh too much, care too much, make every moment count, and I hope that we all have a better 2010.

Any wannabe physicists on this site will appreciate the newest update from CERN. The large Hadron Collider is up and running again. After only a couple of days, proton beams are focused and colliding at relatively low energy levels. Hopefully, levels of around seven trillion electron volts can be reached. Hopefully, the next year will be exciting and I would love to hear in the near future that the Higgs Boson has been identified. Take care, chbare.

Here's an interesting web feed from the LHC. http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html