![[University of Waterloo]](/images/logobars/goldbar.gif)
| Yesterday |
Friday, December 2, 2005
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Editor: Chris Redmond credmond@uwaterloo.ca |
| WHEN AND WHERE |
![[Highsplit against a blue sky]](/images/2005/1202cheer.jpg)
National cheerleading championships today from 3:30 p.m., Physical Activities Complex, tickets $10 at the door. Armenian Students Association presents conference on "Human Rights and Genocide", including Armenian genocide during World War I, the Holocaust, Rwanda and the Sudan, Saturday 10:30 to 2:30, Rod Coutts Hall room 307, free admission, details online. Wilfrid Laurier University faculty of music 30th anniversary concerts Saturday and Sunday, details online. Sports this weekend: Men's hockey vs. Lakehead tonight and tomorrow night (7:30), Columbia Icefield. Men's volleyball vs. Western tomorrow 7:00, Physical Activities Complex. Women's hockey vs. Laurier Sunday 2 p.m., Icefield (fans are encouraged to wear cowboy hats). Swimming today at Eastern Michigan. Basketball (men and women) at Western tomorrow. Track and field at Western tomorrow. Women's volleyball at Ottawa tomorrow. Campus-wide celebration of Maclean's ranking and UW accomplishments in 2005, Monday 1:00, Student Life Centre great hall. Sun Tech Day with experts from Sun Microsystems, Monday 1:00 to 7:00, Davis Centre room 1302, registration online. Last day of fall term classes is Monday. Christmas at the Davis Centre: annual concert by music department choirs, with public carol-sing, Wednesday 12 noon, Davis great hall. English Language Proficiency Examination Wednesday 5 or 7 p.m., Physical Activities Complex. Bring WatCard. |
Paul Kay, the long-time instructor in ERS 250, was there looking proud of his class, and commenting that successful environmental analysis of a problem, on campus or anywhere else, calls on knowledge of multiple disciplines. That was obvious in some of the projects: a "closed loop water system" proposed for the Columbia Icefield requires knowledge of hydraulics, for instance, but also an understanding of what hockey teams and their fans need by way of markings on the playing surface.
A project about the possibility of installing wind turbines on the campus wasn't so much about technical matters as about public understanding of what the devices are, and opinions on whether they'd spoil the attractiveness of the campus. (A sentence on that poster noted that students in the arts faculty had shown the least awareness of wind turbines; one student reading the poster thought that was pretty funny.)
A crowd-pleaser among the 18 posters was one headed "Life Cycle Analysis of Bomber Beer". The student group recommended that the Bombshelter pub buy more of its brew in steel kegs, which are good for as much as 50 years of reuse, and less in individual bottles. It also suggested that bar patrons be invited to bring their own glasses, just as they bring mugs to coffee shops.
One group's work dealt with "direct trails", meaning the unpaved lines across grassland where there is no official path but people want to go anyway. They recommended that a path from the Environmental Studies buildings to the nearest Laurel Creek bridge should be surfaced with something, but that another such trail, diagonally across the Davis Centre quadrangle, should be blocked off (with "a fence or a garden") because vegetation is being wrecked.
Another student group did a "life cycle analysis of a food chain", namely the ingredients of the pizza served at Brubakers in the Student Life Centre; they found that waste is very low but there could perhaps be more attention to other environmental impacts. And yet another group studied "natural gardens" outside the SLC and Needles Hall, recommending that they'd do better if somebody had the resources to maintain them, and might get less trampled if they were marked so passers-by knew they were there.
All the ERS 250 projects will be put online soon, Kay said, joining almost 300 other projects from past years.
Footnote to the morning: Environmental Studies Society volunteers were running a bake sale in the lobby just outside the display area. The cranberry-orange bread was scrumptious.
Mair and her new interest are profiled this month in the continuing Keystone Campaign series focusing on faculty and staff members who contribute to the fund-raising effort.
![[Mair at the rink]](/images/2005/1123mair.jpg)
"Growing up in
Blacks
Harbour, New Brunswick, framed my interest
in rural areas," Mair (left) says. "I've found that rural communities
revolve around three buildings: the church, the school, and the
curling rink. The smaller the community, the more important these
spaces are. Curling clubs are struggling, membership is dwindling,
and curling rinks are expensive facilities to run, but the rinks
are so important to many communities."
She finds it "amazing", the article says, that such little research has been done on the impact of curling in rural Canada, and is taking learn-to-curl lessons to get a better sense of the sport and the people who play it.
What do you like best about working at UW? "Teaching. I'm enjoying getting to know more of the students. I've only been here since July 2004, so I haven't had the benefit of teaching the first- and second-year students. I also enjoy pursuing really interesting research projects and the opportunity to follow my own interests. It's an amazing opportunity to do what I love. . . .
"I'm proud to be at Waterloo, especially because of my department's great reputation in the field of leisure studies. It's nice to be part of that and to have the freedom to investigate issues that matter to me."
What motivates you personally to give to Waterloo? "Supporting students through bursaries and scholarships is important. I'm waiting for the day that post-secondary education will be free, but in the meantime, I contribute to the Keystone Campaign to help students. I'm still paying off my student loans, so I know first-hand how important financial aid can be."
![[Not one but two UW banners]](/images/2005/1128ottawa.jpg)
The olden days:
Last week at the National Gallery in Ottawa, Eric Friesen, BA 1967, and now
the host of CBC Radio 2's midday music show
"Studio Sparks", spoke to some
200 alumni about his early experiences at UW. His talk, "How an Arts
Student Succeeded in a Sea of Engineers", included warm references to former
faculty members Walter Klaassen of Conrad Grebel College,
"Father Hugh" MacKinnon of the history department, and Fred MacRae and Walter
Martin of English. How to succeed? Deploy a measured self-confident bluff,
he said, and choose words with care.
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Clausi's project, "Classification of Operational SAR Sea Ice Imagery," was one of eight selected from an initial pool of 53 projects. "The funding will allow me to continue working on what has been referred to as the 'holy grail' of remote sensing and computer vision technologies, namely, the ability to automatically identify open water and specific ice types in radar-based satellite imagery," said Clausi, whose research interests include computer vision, digital image processing and pattern recognition.
![[Dog as odalisque]](/images/2005/1128bitch.jpg)
'The bitch
with the female gaze': that's the title of a show by Ann Roberts, retired
professor of fine arts, that opens today at
Prime Gallery in central
Toronto. "In the last three years dogs have
dominated my work because of the directness of their gaze," Roberts
reports. This piece echoes Edouard Manet's classic
"Olympia".
An opening reception for the show (which runs through
December 24) starts at 1:00 Saturday afternoon.
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![[CD cover]](/images/2005/1201still.gif)
The DaCapo
Chamber Choir, based at Conrad
Grebel University College, is promoting its debut CD, "Still"
as a Christmas gift. Audio samples are on
the choir's web
site. DaCapo is taking part in a choral workshop with composer
Eric Whitacre tomorrow afternoon at St. John's Church in downtown Kitchener.
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The research challenge, Clausi said, is to create algorithms that perceive the image data in the same manner as the human operator, accounting for variability of the data because of natural fluctuations in the scene and artefacts in the imaging system.
"Remote sensing images are generally quite large and require considerable time and effort to manually process and interpret," Clausi explained. "Certain map products are not feasibly produced by a human operator and computer vision algorithms are necessary to perform such tasks."
Besides Clausi, lead members of the research team include Philippe Maillard, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, and Mohammed Shokr, Atmospheric Environment Service. Additional support is provided by personnel with the Canadian Ice Service, Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, Climate Processing and Earth Observation Division, and the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto. Industry participants include PCI Geomatica, Enfotec, and Noetix Research Inc.
CAR