A former Emo resident received top honours at the National Magazine Awards in Toronto recently.
Alison Rose, daughter of former rep. Dan and Ruth Rose, took home the gold award in the Science, Health and Medicine Category for a story that appeared in Canadian Business Technology magazine’s summer 1997 edition.
The award earned her $1,500.
Rose’s article, “Mind Like a Steel Trap,” which focused on Dofasco of Hamilton, Ont., beat out nine other entries, including articles published in popular Canadian magazines such as Saturday Night and Equinox.
Bruce Headliam, editor of Canadian Business Technology, nominated the story.
Rose wrote of an attempt by two artificial intelligence scientists to create a program that would stop “breakouts” from happening in the continuous casting process at steel mills.
With continuous casting, molten steel is poured into an open-ended mold, then drawn out in one continuous strand, Rose explained in her article, which took two years to complete.
But every so often, the outer skin breaks and molten steel spills out on the machinery before a steel bar solidifies completely.
A breakout costs at least half-a-million dollars to clean up, Rose noted, adding it also is dangerous to the workers and slows down production.
The two scientists Rose wrote about tried to build a neural network that would run through the production data until it was able to predict when a breakout would happen.
The scientists believe they developed a very successful program, Rose noted, but the project was put on hold because Dofasco currently is concentrating on the Year 2000 problem.
Rose started her writing career at the Sudbury Sun Times, where she worked as a correspondent for the Markdale area where the Rose family lives. She later moved to Toronto to study journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic University.
After graduation, she stayed in Toronto, where she found work researching television documentaries and writing freelance articles for newspapers and magazines.
Rose said as she researched for a documentary, she would get a few ideas for magazine articles on the side. She discovered her award-winning idea while researching for a TV documentary on artificial intelligence.
Rose is a senior researcher on a six-hour documentary series “The Sexual Century,” a social history of sex in the 20th century. She also is researching a documentary film on the millennium, and has a couple of other projects in mind.
“I came away from winning that award thinking, ‘Wow, I’m a writer,’” Rose enthused. “I know who I am now, I’m a writer.”