Daily Bulletin

University of Waterloo -- Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

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Monday, July 28, 1997

Crowds coming on August 11

Some 2,500 visitors are expected two weeks from today as UW hosts Student Life 101, a preview of university for new students and their parents. Judging from advance registration, the crowd will be about one-third students, two-thirds parents, says Catharine Scott, associate provost (human resources and student services).

Headquarters for the day will be at Federation Hall, where visitors can see displays from 12 noon to 8 p.m. Buses will take visitors from there to other spots around campus where they can hear presentations and see just what Waterloo's really like.

For example:

Health services plans cooking demonstrations at its building, "and discussions about cooking nutritionally on a shoestring budget and navigating a kitchen when Mom's not there".
The co-op department will offer presentations in Engineering Lecture 101 about "What every student needs to know about co-op".
Counselling services offers, in the Humanities Theatre, a parents' discussion on "the transition as children enter university".
New students can get a jump on having their photos taken and their WatCards issued.

At 4:00 the Varsity Briefcase Drill Team will perform at the Physical Activities Complex, after which UW president James Downey and Federation of Students president Mario Bellabarba will welcome visitors and help answer questions. Then from 5:15 to 7:00, food services is planning a barbecue outside the Math and Computer building.

Staff from dozens of academic and non-academic departments already know their roles -- operating information booths at Fed Hall, answering questions, leading tours, giving academic advice. But more volunteers to help with the day are still wanted (they get yellow T-shirts out of the deal). A meeting for those involved is taking place this Wednesday, July 30, at 10 a.m. in Needles Hall.

The sex case at Simon Fraser

Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British, Columbia, has reinstated its swimming coach, Liam Donnelly, who was fired two months ago after a tribunal found him guilty of sexual harassment.

The case -- which has received national publicity -- involved complaints against Donnelly by student Rachel Marsden, and Donnelly's counter-charges that she was the one who was harassing him. After he refused to appear before the harassment tribunal, it recommended his firing, and cash compensation to Marsden. SFU president John Stubbs put those recommendations into effect.

Donnelly appealed the dismissal, and after arbitration and mediation, the university's board of governors approved the reinstatement on Friday.

Said the mediator, in the recommendations that the board approved: "The University acknowledges that there were flaws in the procedures that led to Mr. Donnelly's dismissal. The findings of the harassment panel were based on Ms. Marsden's credibility. Inconsistencies between her statements before the panel and her response to Mr. Donnelly's harassment complaint cast doubt on her credibility."

The outcome of the case also casts a shadow over Stubbs, who is being criticized for acting rashly to fire Donnelly. Formerly a faculty member in history at Waterloo and then president of Trent University before going to SFU, Stubbs is currently on leave to write a book; the recent negotiations with Donnelly were carried out by acting president David Gagan.

The talk of the campus

Announcement on Saturday afternoon from Bruce Lennox of the information systems and technology department: "The campus news server that receives news from the outside world is being over loaded with articles the past few weeks. Appears to mainly be the result of many many thousands of 'cancel' requests being generated by various 'cancel engines' that have been set up recently at some outside sites. We have tuned the system somewhat, but are still unable to keep up with the required processing at times, and a backlog of incoming articles was filling the available spooling space. In order to keep the system from grinding to a halt, it was necessary to remove a day or so worth of yet unprocessed articles. We will be investigating how to stop receiving certain 'cancel' requests, or some way to process them more quickly." . . .

Central stores has issued a list of surplus equipment that's for sale to UW departments only (not to individuals). The list appeared in last week's Gazette: desks, tables, chairs, "486 computers (no hard drive)", bookcases, filing cabinets, a safe, a laser printer that can't be connected to the campus network, and so on. Information: ext. 2262. . . .

The Graduate Student Association will hold its annual golf tournament this Thursday afternoon at Merry Hill. The price is $22 in green fees and $11 for a steak barbecue afterwards. Today's the deadline for participants to sign up, at the Grad House. . . .

The Environmental Experience summer camp is running one of its Carolinian Canada overnight trips this week -- actually over four nights, Monday through Friday. Participating children will be staying at an ecology centre on Lake Erie near Port Burwell. It's the second such camp as part of this summer's program; the first was held last week.

Waterloo Web site of the day

THE OBJECT-ORIENTED NUMERICS PAGE
http://monet.uwaterloo.ca/oon/

About 40 people a day use this page for its links to dozens of software packages and other reference material in scientific computing, says Todd Veldhuizen, the graduate student in systems design engineering who maintains it:

The page summarizes available resources for scientific computing in object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java. It lists freely available software libraries for linear algebra, arrays, image processing, neural networks, genetic algorithms, partial differential equations, finite elements, and arbitrary precision arithmetic. The page provides pointers to online papers and documents, relevant conferences, and other web indices. A recent addition was a browsable archive of a new mailing list about object-oriented numerics.

Veldhuizen's own home page has not only the usual picture, brief bibliography, and curriculum vitae, but one or two unusual links, such as one to an animated tour of the Vision and Image Processing lab, and one to a "Supernova Quiz".

CAR

TODAY IN UW HISTORY July 27, 1976: Christopher Knapper of the University of Regina is approved to take office as UW's first teaching resource person.

July 28, 1965: The lead item in the Gazette is from the biology department: "Dr. Hynes gave a seminar on July 7th at the Summer School in Limnology at the Kellogg Gull Lake Biological Station of Michigan State University."

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca -- (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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