Daily Bulletin

Unionized staff give OK for strike

"People are fed up with the wages here at Waterloo," he said of the vote. "We are very proud of the membership and the support they have given us."

Talks between the union and the university broke off in July, and a conciliator has been appointed by the province to help reach a settlement. Dates have not yet been set for conciliation.

"We are still hopeful we can reach an agreement," said Stewart. No date has been set for a strike. "We'll wait for the conciliation dates and proceed from there, see what happens."

No details of the wage demands were revealed to union members at Friday's meeting, he added. Instead, "we showed them where they stood, relative to other universities." A comparative wage survey of eight Ontario universities was conducted by the union "to see where we fit in," said Stewart. "The results were very disappointing. We came in last place among those closest geographically. Custodians were well behind those at Wilfrid Laurier University, University of Guelph, University of Western Ontario, McMaster University, York University and Brock University."

Tourism and the Canadian economy

In the series, students and visitors have the opportunity to hear experts from Canada and abroad discuss the cultural, ecological and economic impacts of tourism -- the world's largest and fastest growing industry.

The lectures are given Mondays from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Arts Lecture Hall room 113. They started last week with a talk by Geoff Wall of the geography department, who is president of the International Academy of Tourism.

Most of the remaining speakers are from outside UW: David Weaver of Griffith University, Australia, on October 4; Dallen Timothy of Bowling Green State University on October 18; and so on. Clare Mitchell of UW's geography department will speak on November 8, and Wall again on November 22.

"With global receipts of $444 billion US in 1997, tourism is a major agent of economic, social and cultural change throughout the world, but with considerable risks to environments and communities," Wall says. "With its widely recognized scholars specializing in various aspects of domestic and international tourism, exceptional graduate students and excellent library holdings, UW has an opportunity to play a leadership role in furthering the understanding of the complex interrelationships of tourism."

Undergraduate and graduate tourism courses have been offered at UW for more than a decade. "It's the multi-disciplinary challenges of tourism (economics, cultural diversity, environmental quality and international affairs) that appeal to students," Wall said. For example, graduate students Philip Xie, Abby Liu and Tina Ouyang spent the summer working on a coastal zone management project in Hainan, China, he said.

Stephen Smith and Paul Eagles, both of the recreation and leisure studies department, are also actively involved in the tourism industry. Smith is the chair of the Canadian Tourism Commission and Eagles participates in the Parks and Tourism Initiative of the International Union of Conservation of Nature.

Plans are under way to establish a master's degree level program in tourism policy and planning at UW. Other than hospitality, there are few university-based centres or programs in tourism in Canada. "The University of Waterloo is currently seeking both private and public sector partners to establish a research centre for tourism policy and planning," Wall said. "The primary objective of the centre is to help Canada's tourism industry compete in the global marketplace."

The wanderers of the web

So it was interesting to chat the other day with Kinson Ho, graduate student in computer science, who this week will be handing in his master's thesis on "an effective and efficient web notification protocol", dubbed WatEver.

What ever is it? It's a way of making web robots collect more and better information faster. That's the key to the first of the three big steps in making web searches possible. The second step, indexing, and the third step, retrieval, are somebody else's problem, Ho said, but he's got a new and, he thinks, promising idea for improving collection.

What happens now is that robots from search engines, big and small, and from other sources, keep visiting people's web sites -- checking for web pages, going methodically through a site or flitting from link to link and harvesting what they find. Ho estimates there are 400 robots out there regularly, and based on samples done from four web servers in the math faculty, he says some 7 per cent of requests for web pages are coming from robots. That puts quite an extra load on the server.

At the same time, the web is so big (several hundred million pages) that even the best robot won't get back to any given site oftener than once a month, by which time hundreds of pages may have changed. The result: what's in Lycos or Excite or any other search engine's database is badly out of date. "It's not effective," Ho says.

He's proposing a system, a "protocol", by which a robot creates a publicly readable file digesting where it's been and what it's seen. When another robot comes to its site, instead of wandering through thousands of web pages it can stop at the data file and collect what it needs. Or, as Ho says in an abstract of his work:

Based on a biological energy model, the web robots will evolve through natural selection. Collaboration among web robots is optional, [and] happens only if the end result is beneficial to the their survival. Furthermore, instead of an explicit request/reply protocol, communication is done by examining remote web robots' identity and symbiotically internalizing remote data. In addition, by monitoring the behavior of other web robots, the web robots can self-coordinate without the need of a central authority. Finally, existing web robot architectures can easily adapt to WatEVER and enjoy the benefits immediately.

By his calculation, ten robots out their doing their work and producing his data files will end up collecting 70 times as much good information as one robot can get by itself. A hundred robots at a time, and they start duplicating each other's work too much; the optimal would be about 20, he estimates.

The beauty of it all is that the robots continue to wander the web under their own management. They're operating, Ho says, out of sheer self-interest -- and he credits his graduate supervisor, Gordon Cormack, for the original "self-interested web robots" idea. "I developed his idea, the self-interest concept," he says.

Winners among accounting students

WatCase is described as "an intense, real-world competition" in which teams of students had just over two days to put an actual company's financial house in order. Started three years ago as an experiment, WatCase has been incorporated in the accounting school's curriculum to give students practice in integrating the skills from a variety of academic areas in a realistic setting, explains accounting professor Ken Klassen.

"The goal," he told Barb Elve in the Gazette story, "is to have a realistic setting for students to see how accounting issues are related to broader business issues."

Sleeman Breweries Ltd., Guelph, was the focus of this year's study, allowing students to scrutinize its accounts and business strategy. Working from a 29-page case study which Klassen describes as "a slightly fictionalized version of events," student teams were required to "provide a strategic analysis and evaluation of the fit of the two potential acquisitions into the Sleeman strategy, whether or not the capital expansion should proceed as planned, the evaluation of the 'Sleeman' recipe book sale and the appropriate amount and source of financing for the projects."

Case studies were distributed to the teams at 8 a.m. on a Monday, and students traveled to Guelph for a 10 a.m. tour of the brewery, then returned to campus "to work like crazy for two days," a feat that for most teams included an all-nighter on Tuesday. Written reports were submitted on Wednesday, and oral presentations made on Thursday to a team of faculty adjudicators. "Accounting is more of an interpersonal discipline than is portrayed in the stereotypes," Klassen maintains. "Both written and oral communication skills are important to the job."

Five teams selected by the adjudicators gave presentations again on Friday to a panel made up of Sleeman representatives, accountancy alumni, and school of accounting director Morley Lemon.

At a party Thursday night, the names of the winning team members were announced: Sara Tsang, Lindsay Anderson, Justin Chung and Ricky Tang. Their prizes include commemorative jackets with the WatCase logo and (non-alcoholic) souvenirs from Sleeman's.

In retrospect, says Klassen, students have termed the exercise "the pinnacle event in accounting education" and "a defining moment." While he admits the pressure-cooker project is stressful for the participants, "our purpose is not to beat our students into the ground. The time lines are not particularly unusual for fairly significant analyses. We try to give students a realistic setting and see what they can do."

Other notes for a Monday

Extra auditions have been scheduled for the drama department production of "King Lear", which is to be performed in late November. "Everyone in the UW community is welcome, not just students," writes stage manager Michael Haltrecht. Auditions are scheduled for this afternoon in the studio theatre, Humanities room 180. "Please arrive before 3:15 p.m. Mug shots will be taken and audition forms collected. Audition times will then be assigned. If you are unable to make the audition, please contact the stage manager to make alternative arrangements." Haltrecht can be reached by e-mail: mhaltrecht@uwaterloo.ca.

Here's a note from math student Glen McMillan: "BUDS is a University of Waterloo education advocacy organization. Changes in the secondary school system have made it more difficult for educators to provide support and help for students needing extra attention. We have exciting tutoring opportunities designed to benefit local high school students in their studies. BUDS is looking to recruit students, staff and faculty members to fill these tutoring roles. For only a few hours per week, you can make a real difference by using your expertise to help students reach their potential. As well, the BUDS organizational team needs individuals who are willing to help us implement these tutoring opportunities." Interested? There's a recruiting session this Thursday, at 4:30 p.m. in Davis Centre room 1350; or BUDS can be reached by e-mail, buds@calum.csclub.

Wednesday will bring the annual fall Career Fair, to be held at Bingemans Conference Centre on Victoria Street North in Kitchener. (There are free shuttle buses from the Student Life Centre, every half hour from 9:30 to 2:30.) The event is "an opportunity for students and alumni to network with potential employers . . . to investigate and research career options". A closely-printed sheet was being distributed in the co-op and career services department last week, listing firms that will be represented at the fair -- from Alcan to Canadian Tire, Discreet Logic to Mitel, the Royal Bank to Urban Machinery.

Sports report: the football Warriors defeated Windsor's Lancers 67-9 on Saturday. All Windsor's points were scored in the first half; the second half was all Waterloo, with 60 points scored, many of them thanks to quarterback Ryan Wilkinson, who passed for 330 yards. The only other scores I have this morning are for the men's soccer Warriors, who battled Windsor to a scoreless tie on Saturday and lost to Guelph 1-0 on Sunday.

Help wanted: the Volunteer Action Centre is inviting people to "enrich the lives of women and children in our community by becoming a YWCA volunteer. You could help walk children from their school to an after-school program. Or consider sharing a special skill or expertise with women in our community. As well, practical assistance such as unloading the Food Bank truck, helping sort donations or doing kitchen cleanup is always greatly appreciated." For more information, the VAC can be reached at 742-8610.

Finally, this clarification about the staff training and development program, about which I wrote in Thursday's Bulletin. Katrina Di Gravio of the human resources department points out that I gave the impression the Leadership 2000 program is only for staff "who don't occupy management positions". Au contraire, she says, it's open to all staff. "We encourage managers, supervisors, department heads, chairs, etc., to attend the program as well as those in non-management positions."

CAR

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@uwaterloo.ca | (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
| Friday's Bulletin
Copyright © 1999 University of Waterloo