Daily Bulletin

Back to the daily grind

Two things of importance are happening this week:

• Grade reports from the winter term will be mailed starting today, the registrar's office says. (Hardly any undergraduate students are on campus for both winter and spring terms, so all grade reports will be mailed to students' home addresses.)
• Friday, May 22, is the final day for transactions and budget transfers for the 1997-98 fiscal year, the finance office says. "Requests must be received by that date and must be complete, reasonable and only those transactions of a material dollar value will be processed," says a memo from finance director Jane Manson.

The UW senate will meet at 7:30 tonight in Needles Hall room 3001. On the agenda: again, the budget; again, the Memorandum of Agreement; a proposal for a Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research in the faculty of mathematics, based on two industrial research chairs in the field that were launched last year.

Science visits the schools

The student-run program seeks to explore new horizons in engineering and science by giving children an opportunity to see, touch, invent, design, create and experiment in five distinct camps for children in grades 3 to 12. The science-outreach program was founded in 1990.

Gregory Bridgett, program spokesman, says ESQ will be at Parkway Public School in Cambridge and J. F. Carmichael Public School in Kitchener today. Tomorrow, it's John Darling Public School and Driftwood Public School, both in Kitchener.

ESQ organizers are looking ahead to the one-week camps in July and August, which will give young people a chance to build and test their own projects, participate in interactive tours, and witness scientific demonstrations. "Our camps keep up with the times, make sure that campers of all ages are thinking about the issues important to today," Bridgett says. "More than just doing way-cool hands-on science stuff, our campers will be thinking about the issues and implications -- even in grade 3."

Some of Quest's hot areas are computers and the Internet, environment and ecology. Camps run weekly from July 6 to August 28.

Engineering Science Quest is one of several children's programs that will get going at UW right after Canada Day.

Drawings of 'private park' on display

"Sweet Farm," a news release explains, is a series of architectural, landscape, and sculptural interventions along a series of paths through a varied landscape: old growth and regrowth woods of hemlock and maple; transition woods of poplar, beech, and birch; meadows, marshes, and swamps; glades, creeks, and ponds; as well as ruins of farm buildings and a gravel pit. The scheme is concerned with enhancing and pointing out the natural and man-made landscape features, temporal aspects of nature, and the sensuous aspects of the site.

"Interventions include a mink cage garden assembled from a 1,000-cage pile into a series of semi-transparent enclosures forming a wildlife hedgerow and snow fort; a belvedere which lunges vertiginously off the edge of the forest floor over a gorge; and a meadow painted with stripes of wildflowers. The interventions are being built incrementally with materials harvested from the site, encouraging an ongoing dialogue with the site."

The exhibition which opens today (and runs through June 28) includes documentation of the project -- drawings, photographs, study models, original sketches, three-D aerial photographs, and fragments brought from the site.

Alumni manager, and other notes

A total of 58 faculty members have received special salary increases from an "anomalies fund", the faculty association newsletter reports. The fund was designed to correct some imbalances, especially in departments where salary pressures have meant that recently hired professors are getting paid more than people who came a few years sooner. In other cases, there have been "individual anomalies, sometimes due to low starting salaries in which prior experience was insufficiently weighted". Individual changes ranged from $1,000 to $5,000, says faculty association president Fred McCourt, with the average being about $2,000. "Of the 58 total salary corrections, 36 were to men and 22 to women. The total distribution was $115,550."

A noontime "brown bag" session tomorrow, sponsored by the Employee Assistance Program, will deal with "Effective Communication". The speaker: Allan Goebel, a psychologist with the outside firm that provides counselling services through the EAP. Tomorrow's session will start at 12 noon in Math and Computer room 4045.

The Kitchener-Waterloo Record reported Saturday that a UW student has been found guilty of "numerous charges including making death threats" to a teaching assistant with whom he became obsessed. Brett Jackson's "obsession became so all-consuming he failed a school year, the judge noted. At some point, Jackson began to believe the teacher was deliberately giving him low marks and trying to get him arrested. His campaign of love then turned to one of revenge." He is to be sentenced in July.

"Waterloo Quiz Bowl is getting back into the swing of things," writes organizer Zhan Huan Zhou from computer engineering. "We are an academic competition group that competes against other universities in Canada and the United States. It is the university equivalent of the popular high school competition Reach for the Top. Until recently, Quiz Bowl has existed only in the United States, but there are currently two universities in Canada that offer such a club, Queen's and Waterloo." An organizational meeting is set for tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. in Student Life Centre room 2134. More information: zhzhou@engmail.

The staff association has appointed several new representatives on committees. Among staff members who have taken on new voluntary duties: Elaine Garner of the graduate studies office, as an alternate on the Employee Assistance Program committee; Richard Crispin of psychology, Doug McTavish of finance, and Ed Spike of electrical and computer engineering, on the finance review committee; Joe Cascagnette of athletics, with Marita Williams of the registrar's office as alternate, on the staff grievance committee; Barb Yantha of the staff association office, on the nominating committee; Maureen Jones of continuing education, on the staff training and development committee; Cathy Jardine of the graduate studies office, on the president's advisory committee on traffic and parking.

The career development seminar program continues. Tomorrow at 1:30, it's "Resume Writing", and at 2:30 it's "Career Decision Making", both in Needles Hall room 1020. Also tomorrow, there's an information session for graduating students who will be away on work term in the fall; it starts at 3:30 in the Theatre of the Arts.

Finally, a little correction to last week's Gazette, in which we reported at length on the proposed Memorandum of Agreement between UW and the faculty association. The Gazette said that under the existing Memorandum, the faculty association represents only "full-time" faculty. In fact, it represents all "regular" faculty, which can include some people who work less than full-time.

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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