Mental health and drug- and alcohol-related calls received by UW’s Campus Response Team (CRT) on Halloween accounted for 90 percent of all calls to CRT in Fall 2025, according to information shared by CRT operations coordinator Chad Morris.

Morris, a third-year Health Sciences student and one of CRT’s two coordinators, spoke about the team’s experiences around Halloween, its harm-reduction efforts, and how students can access support during the holiday.

The figure is a sharp increase from Fall 2024, when calls in the above categories on Halloween accounted for 50 percent of calls during the term. Morris also noted that when Halloween falls on a weekday, the weekend before and the weekend after have a proportionally higher share of calls than other weekends. In 2024, Halloween fell on a Thursday. According to Morris, the Friday and Saturday afterwards had more than twice the number of calls received on Halloween itself. When asked about possible reasons for the incidents, Morris clarified that his observations were based on general inferences rather than direct explanations from the people CRT assists.

CRT is a student-run first responder service that provides initial care in medical emergencies, trauma, and mental health crises. Morris said that the team will focus on maintaining its presence on campus during Halloween rather than organizing a separate awareness campaign for the holiday. Morris said CRT members will be in residences from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, and will be available by phone for emergencies. Team members will be stationed in V1, CMH, and Renison University College, but will service nearby residences such as UWP and MKV.

Although the team is not planning a specific Halloween awareness event, CRT continues to conduct harm-reduction outreach. Morris said CRT partnered with UW Health Services to distribute naloxone kits at a naloxone awareness booth at the beginning of the fall term. Morris said the team brought in far more kits than it initially expected to need, but nearly ran out of that supply. “That means there are more people that have that out there, more people that are staying safe, [that] make sure other people stay safe, which is great to see,” Morris said.

CRT also shares occasional awareness posts on Instagram. Morris explained that the team’s administrative coordinator handles much of this online outreach, while CRT members also raise awareness through informal conversations with students in residences. Morris said these conversations provide opportunities to talk to students about available resources and safety.

Morris also encouraged students to contact paramedics if they or someone around them needs immediate medical assistance, rather than waiting out of fear of getting into trouble. “They’re not the police. They’re not going to arrest you and get you in trouble. Their number one priority is making sure that you stay safe.” Calling for help when someone may be experiencing an overdose or another medical emergency is important, even if alcohol or other substances are involved, he advised.

CRT advises students to have their verified phone number (226) 339-0462 on hand before Halloween in case of emergencies. For an immediate life-threatening emergency, call 911.

With files from Angela Li.

UW’s Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience (CTN) hosted their fall research day on Tuesday, Oct. 27. The event included faculty, graduate, and postdoctoral talks followed by a poster session, and brought together researchers from the engineering, math, and arts faculties.

Chris Eliasmith, a professor of philosophy and systems design engineering and founding director of CTN, introduced the Spaun 3.0 brain model. Unlike previous iterations with just a head and an arm, this latest model also includes a robotic body. This allows the agent to recall the locations of hidden objects and report the level of certainty in its memory, after walking around a courtyard opening boxes containing said objects.

The task demonstrates comparability between the model and the human hippocampus, a brain structure responsible for navigation and memory. “It gives us a lot of good data, both from the behavioral side, testing things like the ability to represent your certainty or uncertainty about your memory, testing things like spatial location, working memory, the ability to navigate, pointing, and so on,” Eliasmith summarized.

Jeff Orchard, a professor of computer science, gave a talk on various projects conducted in his Neurocognitive Computing Lab. One area of interest is vector symbolic algebra. “It’s a pretty cool, mathematically not-that-difficult set of methods. If you use this vector representation to represent the states and the actions in reinforcement learning, you can actually learn better and more quickly, more robustly than just [with] learned state representations,” Orchard described.

Orchard’s work was of particular interest to Shalev Manor, a graduate student in applied mathematics, who attended the conference to learn more about biologically inspired machine learning. “Backpropagation, which is the backbone of machine learning, is argued to be not biologically what is going on in the brain, so there are different algorithms out there that are more biologically plausible,” he said, highlighting Orchard’s predictive coding framework as an example of one such algorithm.

Other presenters also explored pattern recognition, like Lily Laevens, a PhD student in psychology studying cognitive neuroscience, who presented her master’s thesis research poster. After noticing that most research uses full intensity facial expressions, she combined neutral and full intensity stimuli using morphing software to study the brain’s response to facial expressions of varying degrees of intensity.

“What I love about going to these things more than anything is it gives you just a little snapshot as to what everyone’s doing in so many different faculties,” she stated. “When you’re in one department or one program, you tend to get locked into this specific angle of thinking about [things], like one perspective.”

Here are some of our top picks for affordable activities you can do this Halloweekend, from Warriors games to costume contests.

Warriors Volleyball Home Opener

Join the Warriors volleyball teams for their home opener where they will take on the Nipissing Lakers.  The women’s team game starts at 6 p.m. and the men’s at 7:30 p.m. this Friday at the Carl Totzke Court in PAC.  Additionally, the first 25 fans to arrive will receive a Sweet Lou’s Cookies coupon.  Admission is free for UW students by either showing their WatCard on arrival or reserving in advance here.

Waterloo Vampire Hangout

Looking for a fun and spooky way to spend your Friday night?  Check out the Waterloo Vampire Hangout happening this Friday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. in Waterloo Public Square.  This free event includes live music, local artists and a vampire fashion show that you can participate in.  No registration is required, but you can find out more information about the event here.

UWDJ gRAVEyard event

This Halloween-themed electronic dance music night is happening right on campus at the Bomber. It runs from 7:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. this Friday, with live sets from student DJs and a costume contest with prizes.  Last call tickets are $20 and you can get them from the WUSA events website here.

Día de los Muertos

Take part in honoring and remembering loved ones who have passed at the Día de los Muertos at Carl Zehr Square, in front of Kitchener City Hall⁣⁣.  The celebration will run from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and includes music, art, food, performances, and traditions.  Everyone is welcome, whether you have celebrated Día de los Muertos before or this is your first time.  Find out more about this event at their instagram page here.

Glow-In-The-Dark Pumpkin Painting

Spend some time relaxing and enjoying the Halloween spirit this Saturday with Glow-In-The-Dark Pumpkin Painting on 132 Ahrens St. W in Kitchener.  Tickets are $5 a person with pumpkins and supplies included, and you can drop in anytime between 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.  Learn more about the event and get tickets here.

In this week’s episode of “God Swap” we travel back to the time of the vikings… well more like they travel here. Follow the journey of the trickster God Loki as he learns to navigate the world and himself.

What happens when the nostalgia of obsolete electronics inspires an artist? More than 20 years ago, multidisciplinary artist Laura Moore began exploring the answer as a stone carver. Since then, she has produced numerous pieces of artwork inspired by technology. Her work is currently featured in the Handheld exhibition at UW’s Art Gallery (UWAG) from Sept. 10 to Dec. 5.

Stone carving, quilting, mold-making, and mosaic assemblage are the four creative methods behind Handheld’s featured pieces, which she and Ivan Jurakic, curator and director of UWAG, selected.

Every stone carving in the exhibition is a 1:1 replica of vintage Nintendo devices, all of which were passed down to Moore by family and friends. “I make everything by hand; the process is time-consuming and intensive. Stone carving (the reductive process) is really the only process that comes naturally to me,” Moore said.

Artist Laura Moore works on her craft. (Photo credit: Paul Cimoroni)

Moore began stone carving in 2001 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University with  professor John Greer and later earned a master of fine arts in sculpture in 2006 from York University. She continued sculpting for the next 20 years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her interest in creating art with other materials developed. “I began quilting… [to work] with second-hand clothing to expand my material process, align with my commitment to sustainability, and to minimize the impact of artwork production,” she noted.

Moore seeks to “provoke conversations about memory and our relationship to the environment” by using “quilt-making techniques to upscale and transform fast-fashion into objects.” Her Memory Quilts feature “textile assemblages” inspired by the interiors of electronic devices she collects and uses.

Her connection to repurposing electronic objects began in childhood. Her father, she says, is a technophile and her mother enjoyed thrifting. Moore also often received hand-me-down devices from her father including her first phones. “Often these objects are tied to my experiences; they’ve travelled with me, entertained me and recorded my memories. I feel connected to them, so when they stop working I have a hard time letting them go,” Moore shared.

KCF2885, 2025, salvaged marble floor tiles, plywood and cement, 19” x 46.5” x 1.5”. (Photo credit: LF Documentation)

Part of her longtime interest in how humanity intersects with obsolete technology comes from wanting to prevent such items from entering landfills. This is why Moore sourced second-hand marble floor tiles from Facebook Marketplace and thrift stores to create a “suite of mosaics that transform cell phone circuit boards into up-scaled tablets,” titled We Were Here in the exhibition.

One challenge Moore faces in her line of work is the physical strain of constructing her art, specifically the process of cutting the tiles for her mosaics. “Balancing work and rest is my biggest challenge, and I’m still figuring that out.” She now works at a slower pace and heeds the advice of loved ones who support her taking breaks. Still, she says she feels the most comfortable spending lots of time in the studio working on her craft and future projects.

Moore says that it’s a pleasure to have her exhibition run alongside Abraham Oghobase’s exhibition, Notes to Self: Offerings on History and Memory. She thanks Jurakic for inviting her to showcase her art. Moore also expresses gratitude to her family for supporting her practice, and to everyone who visits the exhibit.