Daily Bulletin

University of Waterloo -- Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Yesterday's Bulletin | Previous days | UWevents | UWinfo home page

Thursday, December 12, 1996

Faculty salaries are settled

Negotiators for UW and the faculty association yesterday announced an agreement in their 1996 salary negotiations, which have gone on since last spring with various interruptions, including a long break for a vote on unionization. The agreement comes just in time for everybody to take a big breath before 1997 negotiations are scheduled to start.

In the 1996 agreement, there is no change in faculty salary scales. Indeed, what with the Social Contract, professors haven't had a scale salary increase since the spring of 1992. But "progress through the ranks" (merit) increases, which were almost eliminated during the Social Contract, are returning. Here's the settlement as it was announced yesterday afternoon:

1. Full selective salary increases in accordance with Policy 11, to be implemented effective September 1, 1996. The amount paid in 1996-97 will be two-thirds of the annual amount.
2.A one-time flat rate payment in January 1997 equal to one-third of the annual selective increase amount for 1996-97 divided by the number of eligible faculty under this settlement.
3.Extension to April 30, 1999, of the agreement to allow regular faculty within three years of retirement to convert one week of vacation into a 2% increase in base salary.
4.An increase of $200 in the Faculty Allowance over the 1995-96 value.

For comparison -- although comparisons between two different salary systems are difficult -- staff salary scales were increased by 1 per cent this year. Non-union staff at UW are paid on an "all-merit" system, meaning that individual increases could be anywhere from 0 to several percentage points. The average "PTR" increase for a faculty member is usually quoted at about 2.3 per cent.

Deadline for phone changes

Anybody who needs a change made to a UW phone before the new telephone system is introduced in late January will have to request it by Monday afternoon. The deadline, previously announced as December 19, has been pushed up by three days, says Bruce Uttley of information systems and technology:

The deadline has been changed so that Bell will have time to get the changes implemented on the current telephone switch before they start to configure the new switch that is being installed in January. The current switch is used as a starting point for the configuration of the new. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Computing courses are announced

The January and February schedule for computing courses offered by the information systems and technology department is now online. "Many of the more popular courses are being repeated," says Bob Hicks of IST," and there are some new offerings, including "Database Alternatives for PCs and Macintoshes", "Web Communication Tools", "Options for Creating Web Documents Without Learning HTML", "Introduction to Presentations", and "Using WordPerfect Version 7". You can view the complete list of courses on the Web or pick up a brochure from any of the computing consulting offices on campus. Registration for these courses is done on the Web.

Prof hits New York Times

Tuesday's issue of The New York Times included an article by Gina Kolata about a computing breakthrough at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois: a computer program "has come up with a major mathematical proof that would have been called creative if a human had thought of it. . . . It did so with a program that was designed to reason, not to solve a specific problem." And look who's quoted in the Times about the merits of the mathematics involved:

Dr. Stanley Burris, a mathematician at the University of Waterloo in Canada, said that the result was "the first sort of real breakthrough in automated theorem proving," and that it did seem to be different in kind from what went before. It shows, he said, that "it's a very thin line between the mechanical and the creative and it may disappear."

Burris retired earlier this year from the department of pure mathematics. He was "the first human to check the result, though that is not mentioned in the article", notes Will Gilbert, chair of the pure math department.

And these notes on a Thursday

As Christmas gets closer, there are departmental parties just about every day. Today it's the psychology department (potluck starting at 3:00 in the PAS building lounge) and UW's second-largest department, the library (in the Davis Centre fishbowl).

The earth sciences department presents the 1996 Farvolden Lecture tomorrow morning: "a celebration" in honour of the late Bob Farvolden, groundwater expert and dean of science 1977-1982. The speaker this year is Stephen Foster of the British Geological Survey, who will appear in the Humanities Theatre at 9:30 on Friday. Title of his talk: "As the land, so the water: assessing and controlling agricultural impacts on groundwater".

The teaching resource office is offering a workshop next Monday or Tuesday morning on "Freeing Your Voice" -- intended for "those of you who wish to enhance the quality and command of your voice and speech in the teaching environment and in everyday communication". It's led by Anne-Marie Donovan of UW's department of drama and speech communication. Last-minute information: ext. 3132.

CAR

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca -- (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
Comments to the editor | About the Bulletin | Yesterday's Bulletin
Copyright 1996 University of Waterloo