Daily Bulletin

Day of the green T-shirts

Also starting today are Engineering Science Quest, based in the engineering faculty, and the Environmental Experience camp, based in the Heritage Resources Centre in environmental studies.

Other new things at the ever-changing university:

Co-op students will find out today about their fall term jobs, as job match results will be posted in Needles Hall. If the news is good, start packing; if not, well, meetings are scheduled at 4:30 p.m. to give unplaced students more information about the "continuous phase" of job placement over the coming weeks.

A couple of administrative appointments went into effect as of July 1. Keith Warriner becomes chair of the sociology department, succeeding Ron Lambert. Laurie Hoffman-Goetz becomes associate dean (graduate studies and research) in the faculty of applied health sciences. And back on May 1 -- I don't think we ever managed to report this one in the Gazette -- Alex Penlidis became associate dean (graduate studies and research) in the faculty of engineering.

The WatCard office should be open for business today in its new quarters, on the lower level of the Student Life Centre.

Construction will begin tomorrow on the Physical Activities Complex quad area, which means there will be no parking there for the next while, says parking manager Elaine Koolstra. The closest available parking during the construction will be lot M at $2 per entry. Completion will be by the end of July, she says, and the quad will then have two metered disabled spaces, six one-hour meter spaces for use by SLC clients, and signed parking for three service vehicles.

Watsa happening Halfway between basketball seasons, I want to drop in a little tribute to Warrior guard Mano Watsa, who's back from an early summer trip to India and Thailand as part of a team representing the Christian group Athletes in Action. "We played games and did some ministry," he explains. I had a chance to watch Watsa briefly last week as he was guest coach at a kids' basketball camp sponsored by Rockway Mennonite Collegiate Institute in Kitchener. I don't know which impressed me more: his renowned basketball skills (he gave a hot-dog demonstration of dunks from all directions, to great cheers from the kids) or his less well known ability to talk to youngsters about teamwork and discipline, and actually get them to listen. Watsa will be spending much of the rest of the summer running his own basketball camps in the Windsor area. He'll be back at UW next fall and winter, studying fourth-year recreation and leisure studies, and playing guard one more season for the Warriors. The 5-foot-10 Watsa has already been rated Most Valuable Player for the Warriors for three seasons; can a fourth MVP title be on the way?

House of Cedar, a Waterloo-based company that makes saunas, gazebos and other wood products, has donated a gazebo that will stand picturesquely beside UW's Laurel Lake, just below Conrad Grebel College. The university provided the concrete pad on which it stands, says Tom Galloway, manager of custodial and grounds services. The K-W Record reported the other day that "Sales manager Glenn Morgan says the company thought the gazebo would be a nice addition to the college because its grounds are a popular place to take wedding photos. He says the company plans to use the gazebo for its own photo shoots."

The fourth annual St. Jerome's University golf tournament is being held today at the New Dundee Golf and Country Club.

The Federation of Students is sponsoring a focus group on improving memory power. The group will meet weekly on Tuesdays, starting July 15, says Robin Stewart, the Feds' vice-president (education). It's being led, he says, by Dave Farrow of WizardTech Inc., who holds the world record for -- I'm not making this up -- memorizing the order of 52 decks of cards all shuffled together. "The session is free of charge and open to any member of the university who could gain from a better memory," says Stewart, who can be reached at ext. 2340.

And a three-session series on exam stress management, sponsored by the counselling services department, will start Wednesday (Needles Hall room 2080, 10 a.m. to noon). It promises "a comprehensive range of skills to help students cope with examination stress", such as managing physical signs of stress, "redirecting and controlling disruptive thoughts", and "enhancing positive thoughts". Information and sign-up sheets are available in the counselling services office.

University research worth billions
-- from the University of Manitoba Bulletin

A lot more than you might think, according to a new study by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.

The AUCC paper was prepared by Fernand Martin, a professor of economics at the Université de Montréal, and Marc Trudeau, senior analyst with the AUCC.

The paper differentiates between the traditional "static" measures of economic impact, and "dynamic" impacts. Static impacts are based on measures of spending. In 1994-95, overall spending on university research in Canada was estimated at $4.8 billion. While that spending supports tens of thousands of jobs across Canada, the AUCC paper says the impact of research is much greater.

In addition to creating jobs in the present, university research has a measurable impact on long-term growth by increasing the "underlying productivity" of the economy, the authors say. To calculate that, they took existing estimates of the impact of overall productivity increases on the growth of Canada's gross domestic product. According to those estimates, productivity increases accounted for more than $70 billion of Canadian GDP in 1993, with research and development accounting for about 70 per cent of the increase in productivity. Factoring in the amount of Canada's R and D that is done at universities brings a total impact on the Canadian economy of more than $15 billion.

Choir is 'mad about' opera

Director Marta McCarthy and concert organizers are promising "some of the most dramatic works for the human voice ever written", including music from "Carmen", the politically incorrect opera about the cigarette girl and the sadistic police chief, and "Porgy and Bess", the even more politically incorrect opera about, well, let's not go there right now.

The 55-voice choir, made up of students from many programs at UW, will be joined for choruses and arias by Norma Churchill, soprano, who will sing the role of Belinda from "Dido and Aeneas"; Inna Golsband, mezzo-soprano, who will sing the Sorceress from the same opera, as well as the role of Carmen; and the Amarone String Quartet.

The full performance of "Mad About Opera" is scheduled for Thursday, July 30, at 8 p.m. at the Maureen Forrester Recital Hall at Wilfrid Laurier University. Tickets for that performance are $10 (students and seniors $8).

UW web site of the day

"Small is beautiful," says the page. "We have very small ambitions: to publish limited-run, beautiful books of poetry and prose." So far Trout Lily Press, loosely associated with St. Jerome's University, has produced half a dozen titles.

Why the press, and why the page? Gary Draper, librarian at St. Jerome's and a key figure in Trout Lily, explains: "It exists so that people with an interest in books (because they want to buy one or they want to be published in one, or just because they are interested in books) can see what we do; we can't afford to produce a paper catalogue at this point, and we don't have any sort of distribution network."

And about the web page itself: "Hey, we think it's pretty splashy that you can click on a book and get a sample poem. But also, because design of the books matters a lot to us, we are happy that the viewer gets some sense of the appearance of our books from the coloured images on the web page." There have been complimentary remarks from some other web page designers, he reports.

CAR

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