Daily Bulletin

Thursday, August 21, 1997

Student stats chart changes

Tables of information outline numbers of students, where they are from, what programs they take and what degrees they earn, comparing changes over time.

For example, a quick look at Table #1 reveals that total enrolment stood at 25,245 for 1986/87, peaked at 27,297 in 1991/92, and fell to 23,420 in 1995/96. Why the recent decrease? The slight increase in full-time enrolment was offset by a substantial decrease in the number of part-time students over the years. That's the short answer.

Table # 3, which compares the male and female enrolment over the same 10-year period, shows the 61 per cent male and 39 per cent female ratio in 1986 shifted to 55 per cent male and 45 per cent female by 1996. For inquiring minds, a further breakdown of the distribution of men and women is provided for undergraduate and graduate students in each faculty.

The geographic distribution of full-time undergraduate students by county is illustrated in a map of Ontario in Table #8. While the majority of students (3,328) hailed from the region of Waterloo in 1996, there were 2,168 from Toronto and 1,089 from Peel region. Rainy River contributed 11, Manitoulin 9, and Haliburton 8. Among other provinces and territories, the most UW students came from British Columbia, with Quebec and Alberta holding second and third place. The United States provided the largest contingent of full-time undergraduates from the international community, with other significant numbers from Hong Kong, Ireland and Germany.

The number of international graduate students on visas has dropped significantly since 1993 when the total reached 368. In 1996 there were only 181 students in that category, with the largest numbers from the People's Republic of China, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States. During the same period the number of full-time undergraduate students on student visas fell from 556 to 253.

Reflecting the overall decline in part-time student enrolment, distance education has also taken a hit with 3,157 students registered in that department in 1996, compared to 4,088 in 1994.

Busker bash begins with barbecue

Arriving from across Canada, the United States, and as far as Scotland and Belgium, the band of buskers is billeted at the UW Conference Centre during the festivities, which continue through the weekend in uptown Waterloo.

A children's area offers rides, face painting and free balloons starting Friday, and an adult show is scheduled for Saturday at 11:30 p.m. Festivities close with a family-style vaudeville show on Sunday at 4 p.m.

Waterloo Web site of the day

"Active Expressions is a class library for managing concurrency in C++," writes Mauricio De Simone on this web page. "Complete concurrent applications can be instantiated by composing building blocks that represent many well-known communication and synchronization patterns that can be composed using language features. The composition primitives are basic concurrent building blocks (pipeline, replication, broadcast, etc.) that control the communication among components. All these facilities are programmed within standard C++ without the use of extra tools."

If you're lost, then the Active Expressions page may not be useful to you. But if you're a programmer in the widely used C++ language, you may find it very useful indeed. Or at least De Simone, who's a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering, hopes so:

The page exists to serve as reference and advertisement for my library and the research group that is now forming around it. Active Expressions simplifies the development of applications that run on multiprocessor computers and networks of workstations.Even though this has been attempted before, Active Expressions offers a novel "in-language" solution that simplifies the complex issues that arise in concurrent programming.

Barbara Elve
bmelve@nh4.adm.uwaterloo.ca

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 © 1997 University of Waterloo