Daily Bulletin

Here's comfort for tree-lovers -- reported by Barbara Elve

Derek Tomlinson, a civil engineering graduate student, is speaking up for WE'RE SAD, a group of some 10 engineering students formed when the giant spruce tree on the Grad House grounds was struck by lightning in June and had to be cut down. "There seems to be no practice of tree replacement," he lamented in a posting to the newsgroup uw.general, warning that the Grad House will soon "look like all the clear-cut subdivisions of today, barren".

Not only did the spruce shade the building from the sun, Eric Praetzel chimed in, but it enhanced air quality around "the last den of the nicotine addicts on campus".

"Just when we thought the devastation was over, again more trees have fallen to the axe," WE'RE SAD announced this week after observing trees in front of Engineering III and Matthews Hall being axed. "Are there any plans to replace these soldiers of heritage?" Tomlinson asked. "Does UW really have to look like an industrial park?" David Evans added.

The answer, according to grounds foreperson Jerry Hutten, is no: it doesn't, and it won't. "We value the trees and try to maintain the trees we have to the best of our ability," says Hutten. But "quite a number are failing from environmental factors -- droughts, pests, disease -- and are being removed."

An example is the Austrian pine in front of Burt Matthews Hall, which struggled with diplodia blight for some time before it was recently axed. Some trees, mainly evergreens, have been cut down for safety reasons when they obscure light near sidewalks, and others, initially planted too close together and weakened by their competition for water and nutrients, have been thinned out as well.

Perhaps one of the best-kept secrets at UW is the tree nursery on the north campus beside the greenhouses, which has provided replacement saplings for the past 10 or 15 years, he said. "It's not the thinking at all to have fewer trees on campus," and plans for continuing replacement of trees are under way, with an emphasis on hardy indigenous species which tend to be more drought and disease resistant. Among the areas slated for replanting is the Grad House grounds, which is "getting very bare".

Unlike trees in the forest, a tree in an urban environment needs special care, Hutten added. "It's not in a natural setting." He'd even welcome volunteer help with watering and mulching.

As for WE'RE SAD, the group may pursue official club status with the Federation of Students, and has discussed applying any funding it receives to tree planting. As engineers -- not usually known as tree huggers, Tomlinson admits -- "We're the anomaly of the bell curve." The group hopes to broaden its base as an environmental awareness group and be open to students from all faculties.

Blader ends up in stitches

The question of whether to lift the ban on inline skates has been referred to the committee on traffic and parking, which plans to address the issue before September, says parking manager Elaine Koolstra. In her conversations with representatives from other universities at recent parking conferences, she's found that "everyone tends to ignore them and hopes they'll go away." Few campuses have developed policies to deal with the skates, she added.

In spite of that, the skates are ubiquitous and injuries happen. At a recent meeting of the UW joint health and safety committee, members learned of a recent incident at the University of Guelph in which an student on skates crashed through a glass door inside a building. "The University of Guelph has tightened up their policy on inline skates," Stewart said.

Universities' revenues are down

"Reduced revenue has meant reduced expenditure. Salary and benefits expenditures fell 3.4% in one year and 5.2% over five years. In 1992/93, salary costs represented 66.1% of expenditures. In 1996/97, this proportion was 64.2%.

"At a time when students are facing tuition fee increases, they have benefitted from increased expenditure on scholarships and bursaries. Although this is a relatively small expenditure category, scholarship and bursary expenditures increased 7.1% in one year and 30.4% over five years, reaching $262.6 million dollars in 1996/97."

Altogether, Canadian universities spend $11,460,174,000 in 1996-97, StatsCan said.

PhD theses for defence

Civil engineering. Daniel Urfer, "Effects of Oxidants on Drinking Water Biofilters." Supervisor, P. M. Huck. Oral defence July 30, 2 p.m., Engineering II room 3324.

Civil engineering. Stephen Daniel John Booth, "Formation and Removal of Ozonation By-products in Biologically Active Drinking Water Filters." Supervisor, P. M. Huck. Oral defence August 4, 10 a.m., Engineering II room 3324.

Civil engineering. Hamza Ouadfel, "Numerical Simulations of Granular Assemblies with Three-Dimensional Ellipsoid-Shaped Particles." Supervisors, L. Rothenburg and M. Dusseault. Oral defence August 6, 10 a.m., Engineering II room 2348.

Systems design engineering. Pengfei Shi, "Flexible Multibody Dynamics, A New Approach Using Virtual Work and Graph Theory." Supervisors, J. McPhee and G. Heppler. Oral defence August 7, 9:30 a.m., Davis Centre room 2577.

Electrical and computer engineering. Hoan H. Pham, "Numerical Capacitance Extraction for Large-Area Systems." Supervisor, A. Nathan. Oral defence August 14, 2 p.m., Davis Centre room 2577.

Civil engineering. Eric Hildebrand, "An Activity-Based Travel Needs Model for the Elderly." Supervisors, B. G. Hutchinson and B. Hellinga. Oral defence August 18, 9 a.m., Engineering II room 3324.

These theses are currently on deposit in the graduate studies offices of the science and engineering faculties, respectively.

UW web site of the day

It's nothing but plain text -- words in paragraphs, originally posted to several on-campus newsgroups and "edited slightly" when it was put on the web by Gordon Cormack of the computer science department. What makes the page of interest is its provocative opinions.

"I wrote the article," Cormack says, "after several people complained to me and to the associate dean that CS 241 labs were consuming too much of their time, which they were unable to spend on other courses. As mentioned in the article, this problem is common, and it is not always obvious from looking at the tasks assigned *why* they take some students so long. After some reflection I wrote the article and posted to the course newsgroup and to computer science undergraduate and graduate newsgroups. Its intent is partly to explain why some students take so long and partly to provide some suggestions about how to reduce the amount of time."

Says Cormack's essay: "One of the problems is that CS professors are an atypical bunch: some acquired core competence in programming in a few tens of hours; some acquired the meta-concepts while bypassing core competence in programming. . . . Compilers have a fatal flaw in their gatekeeping ability -- once you have a solution to a problem, no matter how small, it usually continues to be a solution. The knowledge gleaned from a proof-of-concept may be adapted or expanded to the real solution, or may suggest a better approach."

Another passage in the essay compares computer programs to Christmas tree lights.

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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