Daily Bulletin

Government giveth, and taketh away

The provincial government has cancelled the program, which was to cost $15 to $20 million a year starting this fall, Southam News is reporting this morning.

"Education Minister Dave Johnson didn't bother to tell anyone," the Southam report says. "The cancellation only came to light when a student from the Eastern Ontario city of Pembroke asked whether she qualified."

The report goes on:

There are just under 400,000 community college and undergraduate university students in Ontario. If the two per cent with the highest marks were granted scholarships, about eight thousand university students would have been exempted from paying tuition.

Daniele Gauvin, a spokeswoman at the Ministry of Education, said ministry staff had examined the feasibility of the scholarship after its initial announcement and "a decision was made not to pursue it."

After Johnson replaced Snobelen as education minister that autumn, the government decided to focus its aid on need-based bursaries rather than merit-based scholarships.

Gauvin acknowledged that Johnson had never announced the cancellation of the scholarships. Why not? "I don't know," she replied after a long pause.

Students, Gauvin said, should have inferred the scholarships had been cancelled from the absence of any further announcements.

Big grant for smoking research

Smith has been awarded a three-year grant totalling $439,975. In 1998-99, the project will receive $245,355; $144,946 in 1999-2000; and $49,674 in 2000-2001. She will be the principal investigator in a clinical trial of an in-patient smoking cessation program, which will involve three local hospitals.

"The project will help hospitalized patients who smoke to use their hospitalization as an opportunity to kick the smoking habit for good," she said. Her research interests cover the prevention and control of lifestyle related diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, as well as smoking cessation programs.

This week's positions; other notes

• Applications database administrator (PeopleSoft), information systems and technology, grade USG 11-12.
• Secretary, independent studies, grade USG 4.
• Custodial foreperson, plant operations, grade USG 7.
• Assistant supervisor, user services, Dana Porter Library, grade USG 6.
• Administrative assistant, office of the vice-president (academic) and provost, grade USG 7.

The monthly draw for a winner in the Dollars for Scholars raffle was held earlier this week. Latest lucky fella: Peter Woolstencroft, associate dean (special programs) in the faculty of arts.

Downtime for Trellis, the computer system for libraries at UW, the University of Guelph and Wilfrid Laurier University, started this morning. Until it's up again, in about two days, the best available substitute is the old WatCat database.

Co-op students who are still in search of fall term jobs are checking the Needles Hall bulletin boards regularly, or ought to be. Job posting #7 of the "continuous phase" placement process goes up today. (Note from the co-op department, by the way: "Students are encouraged to get Work Report Writing Guidelines before leaving campus."

A production of "Fame: The Musical" comes to the Humanities Theatre tonight (and Thursday and Friday) at 7:30. It's presented by youngsters in the summer theatre school operated by the Waterloo Catholic District School Board -- which means that a group of high school students hoping for success in acting, singing and dancing are putting on a show about a group of high school students hoping for success in acting, singing and dancing. Might be worth seeing. Tickets are $12, students $10, and will be for sale at the door (or from the school board, 578-3660 ext. 333).

"All engineers who apply to become Professional Engineers in Ontario after July 1, 1998, will require 4 years of professional experience," warns Roydon Fraser in the systems design engineering department, the local liaison for the Professional Engineers of Ontario. Students can get credit for one year of that experience for work done before graduation, he notes. To find out more, a seminar is being offered at UW -- we've missed yesterday's showing already, but future sessions will be tomorrow, July 23, and next Tuesday, July 28, both at 11:30 a.m. in Engineering Lecture room 101. "A 38-minute video will be shown, followed by a question-and-answer period," Fraser says.

PhD theses for defence

UW web site of the day

"Anyone doing research needs some way to record their notes and thoughts that provides easy access back to the information," says Adam Hatfield, a graduate student in systems design engineering. "The linked nature of web pages is ideal for this."

So -- here's his home page, with links to various of pieces of work he's done in the fields of crisis management and risk assessment. A typical title: "System Identification in Risk Assessment, the Alachlor Controversy".

"Since the pages were already written," says Hatfield, "I decided to post them on the Web for others to see. The pages will eventually evolve to be my actual thesis, so the Web will see the final copy before my evaluators do! . . . Its greatest convenience is that when people ask me what I do, I can simply refer them to the site to get all the details."

One direction in which Hatfield's work has taken him is a study of guidelines and criteria for the design of keyboards. He talks about a few existing guidelines for key size, keyboard layout and so on, and reports that "The criteria most often stated as the reason for these guidelines are speed and accuracy, with comfort and safety being mentioned intermittently at best. It is therefore unclear just how many of these universally accepted guidelines have been validated for health and safety considerations. . . . Two infamous examples of non-standardization are the size and shape of the Enter key and the position of the "|" or "pipe" key. . . . There is incredible inertia in government and business against changes to the traditional Qwerty keyboard."

Just in case anyone should think Hatfield is all work and no play, he also has home page links noting his interests in the flute and in martial arts.

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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