The day Canada got its flag

Daily Bulletin

Staff member is mourned Adassa Burey, a member of the custodial staff in UW's plant operations department, died Saturday. She was 63. She is survived by her husband, Charlie, a son and a daughter and many other family members. The funeral will be held Saturday at 10 a.m. at the Kitchener Church of God, 533 Weber Street East. There will be visitation tonight (7 to 9 p.m.) and Friday (2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m.) at the Ratz-Bechtel Funeral Home. Memorial donations to the Canadian Cancer Society were suggested.

UW names on Order of Canada list

The government announced the appointments yesterday among 98 new Companions, Officers and Members of the Order. The appointments are retroactive to November 15, 2000.

William T. Tutte (left) was honoured not just for his work as a teacher and theoretical mathematician, but for his contributions to breaking German codes for the British armed forces during World War II. That work led to a lifelong interest in cryptography, and Tutte is now honorary director of the UW Centre for Cryptographic Research.

In a citation for the CRM-Fields Institute Prize in mathematics a few weeks ago, colleagues said of Tutte that "In graph theory he established fundamental results for matching, connectivity, symmetry in graphs, reconstruction, colouring, Hamiltonian circuits, graphs on higher surfaces, graph enumeration and graph polynomials. In matroid theory, he is the single most important pioneer."

He becomes an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Also named an Officer is Arthur Carty, president of the National Research Council of Canada, who was a professor of chemistry at UW from 1967 to 1994 and dean of research 1989-1994. He received an honorary degree from Waterloo in 1997. The Order of Canada citation calls him "an internationally respected chemist" and adds that at NRC, "His energetic leadership and clear vision have made the Council a major player in the development and expansion of new frontiers of scientific exploration."

Two outside friends of the university were both named Members of the Order:

• Lyle Hallman, Kitchener industrialist whose contributions to UW led to the Matthews Hall west wing being named the Lyle Hallman Institute. A professorship in the field of health promotion also bears his name.
• Ken Murray of Cambridge, whose support of research into Alzheimer's disease led to the UW program in that area being named the Kenneth G. Murray Alzheimer Research and Education Project.

Lecture on sustainable development

The speaker is Naresh Singh (right), who is visiting UW this winter as Canada Trust/Walter Bean visiting professor in environmental studies. When not at UW, Singh is principal advisor in Poverty and Sustainable Livelihoods for the United Nations Development Program.

"We have the tools to revolutionize traditional policy-making for optimum management of our environment," says Singh. "Recent developments in biology, economics, computer science and systems thinking and in social design and complexity theory are producing tools with phenomenal potential." He'll elaborate on those statements today, and will also speak about what UW faculty and students are doing and what needs to be done to share expertise in developing countries.

The lecture starts at 4:00 this afternoon. It's open to the public at no charge, but seating is limited. Call 888-4973 for last-minute tickets.

Engineers take their obligation

The web site for the independent agency that manages the Iron Ring tradition gives this background:

The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer has a history dating back to 1922, when seven past-presidents of the Engineering Institute of Canada attended a meeting in Montreal with other engineers. One of the speakers was civil engineer Professor Haultain of the University of Toronto. He felt that an organization was needed to bind all members of the engineering profession in Canada more closely together. He also felt that an obligation or statement of ethics to which a young graduate in engineering could subscribe should be developed. . . .

Haultain wrote to Rudyard Kipling, who had made reference to the work of engineers in some of his poems and writings. He asked Kipling for his assistance in developing a suitably dignified obligation and ceremony for its undertaking. Kipling was very enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both an obligation and a ceremony formally entitled "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer." . . .

The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer has been instituted with the simple end of directing the newly qualified engineer toward a consciousness of the profession and its social significance and indicating to the more experienced engineer their responsibilities in welcoming and supporting the newer engineers when they are ready to enter the profession. . . .

The Iron Ring has been registered and may be worn on the little finger of the working hand by any engineer who has been obligated at an authorized ceremony of the Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer. The ring symbolizes the pride which engineers have in their profession, while simultaneously reminding them of their humility. The ring serves as a reminder to the engineer and others of the engineer's obligation to live by a high standard of professional conduct. It is not a symbol of qualification as an engineer -- this is determined by the provincial and territorial licensing bodies.

They do not preach that their God will rouse them
a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not teach that His Pity allows them
to drop their job when they dam'-well choose.

Today's event will be preceded by a day of hijinks around the engineering buildings, and followed by the Iron Ring Stag at Bingeman Park. The Iron Warrior has explained that "One tradition of the IRS is for everybody to find the nuttiest, goofiest, ugliest clothes they can find." And it gets wilder from there -- it's not for nothing that the price of Stag tickets includes a pair of special (black) IRS boxer shorts.

Volleyball thriller; other notes

Otherwise, things are distinctly slowing down on a campus that's about to enter the catch-up days of winter reading break. However, a few things are happening. . . .

• A job posting for architecture students for the spring term goes up today in the co-op department.
• W workshop on "The Work Finding Package" will be offered at 3:30 as part of the career development series (the career resource centre in Needles Hall has details).
• The department of statistics and actuarial science has a talk at 3:30 (Math and Computer room 5158) by Julia Wirch of Simon Fraser University, on "Distortion Risk Measures and Their Application".
• UW's Jewish studies program is among the sponsors of a presentation and performance of Sephardic music tonight at 7:00 in the "green room" at Wilfrid Laurier University. The speaker is ethnomusicologist Tamar Ilana Cohen Adams of York University.

Tomorrow brings the annual general meeting of Imprint Publications, the corporation that publishes the student newspaper Imprint. All students who have paid the Imprint fee -- that's the great majority -- are entitled to attend and vote. The meeting will start at 12:30 p.m. in Student Life Centre room 1116.

And tomorrow night brings an open house at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, attached to Wilfrid Laurier University. The event starts at 6 p.m. and includes a concert (7:30). I'll say a little more about it in tomorrow's Bulletin.

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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