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Tuesday, June 27, 1995

Common Sense Revolution, day one

Mike Harris was sworn in yesterday as premier of Ontario and named John Snobelen as his minister of education and training. Snobelen, the member of the Legislature from Mississauga North, is president of an environmental waste trucking company and a consulting firm; he's also associated with the Hunger Project and with the Carter Centre in Atlanta, a peacemaking organization. He is 40 years old.

The new education minister will have to address everything from school reform to university funding. That point came up yesterday at a meeting of UW's senate finance committee, where provost Jim Kalbfleisch summarized the developments of the past year or two, including the funding study done by the Ontario Council on University Affairs. "That report, as I understand it, is finished and will be sitting on the new minister's desk," the provost said.

Elsewhere in the cabinet, Elizabeth Witmer, member for Waterloo, becomes minister of labour. The new chair of the management board is Dave Johnson, a systems analyst who has a master's degree in mathematics from UW.

Distinguished visitor from Japan

Kiyoo Itoh, "senior chief scientist" for Hitachi and one of the important figures in the development of semiconductors, is at UW this summer as a Distinguished Visitor to the Institute for Computer Research. Besides working with ICR researchers on technical matters, he'll be giving two major lectures -- one "for a general audience" tomorrow, the other more technical and scheduled for July 6.

The general lecture is scheduled for 2:30 tomorrow in Davis Centre room 1302. Title of Itoh's talk: "Trends in VLSI Memory Technology".

One big list of coming events

Let me introduce "UWevents", the new name for a single listing that until now has looked like two different things. UWevents is a database of coming events at the university, maintained here in the office of information and public affairs.

Each Wednesday, a week's worth of UWevents will appear in the Gazette. And every day, 24 hours a day, you can look at UWevents on-line -- either through the UWinfo gopher, for those still using that soon-to-be-obsolete technology, or on the UWinfo Web.

If you're the organizer of an event, you can -- and should -- send information about it to "UWevents" at the Info & Public Affairs office in Needles Hall. E-mail address: rohrbach@nh3adm.

News from Smith Center, Kansas

After six days of the nine-day Sunrayce 95 for solar cars across the central United States, the UW-built Midnight Sun III is still in 20th place. It pulled into Smith Center last night after some 47 hours of travel over the six days, with an average speed of 17.96 miles per hour. Still in first place is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at 37.56 mph.

Briefly, some announcements

Final note from the finance committee

"In 1995-96," said Jim Kalbfleisch at yesterday's meeting of the senate finance committee, "we're really back at 1991-92 levels in terms of our income. Given that, it's kind of amazing -- the university has coped really well."

Also: "My summary of the financial situation for 1996-97 is, who knows? I can't remember a time when we knew so little. This is going to be an interesting year. Take heart, and enjoy the summer."

So this morning it's raining.

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

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