Midnight Sun shines on Davis wall

from Eng-e-News, the engineering faculty's electronic newsletter

The Davis Centre isn't a typical retirement home, but then again, the Midnight Sun VII isn't a typical retiree.

Last week the record-breaking vehicle was officially "retired" to its now permanent home on the west wall of the fishbowl lounge in the William G. Davis Computer Research Centre during a celebration that included engineering and university officials, team sponsors and team members. The vehicle is mounted vertically to concrete beams on the wall, with the nose about nine feet off the ground.

In 2004, Midnight Sun VII toured around North America for 41 days and journeyed over 15,000 km to capture the Guinness World Record for the longest distance travelled by a solar-powered car.

Commenting on the celebration and team's accomplishments Midnight Sun's business manager Jessica Whitney says, ”We are very happy to be able to give back to the school. They have been forever supportive of this project. As team members, we were all proud to see the car on the wall. So many people put so many hours into the team and it was very rewarding to see the car displayed so beautifully. I think some of the alumni were also impressed with the way the car is mounted!"

Last month the team was presented with the Progress Towards Sustainable Development Award (College or University Level) for 2006 at the Yves Landry Foundation's STARS Gala. The team received $5,000 "in recognition of their innovative programs to advance technological education and skills training."

Although Midnight Sun VII has officially retired, the Midnight Sun team is still on the job designing Midnight Sun IX. Midnight Sun VIII was the top Canadian entry in the 2005 American Solar Challenge, which ran from Austin, Texas to Calgary, Alberta. In 2007, Midnight Sun IX will be put to the test at the World Solar Challenge in Australia. With any luck, the latest Midnight Sun model will shine just as brightly as its award-winning predecessors.

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Drops from the daily datastream

Dana Evans Laity of UW's marketing and undergraduate recruitment office is off this weekend to the seventh largest city in the world — or the eighth, or tenth, or 23rd, depending on who's doing the counting. In any case it's Istanbul, the metropolis of Turkey, which is, as Evans points out, "a new market for UW. Canada is not well known to this US-saturated market." Along with representatives of other Canadian institutions, she'll be meeting with students, counsellors parents and educators: "Our co-op system of study, although very competitive to get into for international students, is of high interest, as this type of system of study is nonexistent in Turkey." She'll make a brief side trip to the country's capital, Ankara, but mostly visit top-quality high schools in the big city.

As UW reaches out to hire star academics from around the world, they sometimes arrive with what's known in the business as a "trailing spouse", a wife or husband who's also in search of an academic job. Roydon Fraser, president of the UW faculty association, writes in the new issue of the association's Forum about what happens next: "In 2004 the FAUW championed the move to have UW's spousal hiring procedures incorporated into Policy 76 for the purposes of clarity and fairness . . . the change became effective in early 2005. It is only fair that those spouses hired into non-permanent positions clearly know the limitations of the commitment being made. Unfortunately, we are learning that what appears clear to one person is not clear to another. Concern has arisen with regard to . . . the criteria that, 'The spousal appointee should be of such calibre that when the next vacancy arises in the department/school, he/she would be a credible candidate for that position.' . . . Some interpret this criteria to mean that a spousal hire will be considered for the next vacancy, while others impose the implicit restriction that a spousal hire will only be considered for the next vacancy if that department wishes to hire in the spousal hire's research area. . . . The FAUW and the Administration are working on revising the spousal hiring procedure criteria to make clearer to the spousal hire the actual commitment being made by the spousal hire's department, and to make it clear to departments the commitment they are making."

Two engineers with UW links were among those who received 2006 Ontario Professional Engineers Awards last Saturday at the OPEA's Awards Night in Toronto. William Melek, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, was presented with the OPEA 2006 Young Engineer Medal. Tom Brzustowski, a former Waterloo professor of mechanical engineering who served for a time as provost, was honoured with the OPEA 2006 Gold Medal. Brzustowski, who later was president of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, is currently serving in a part-time role as senior advisor and chair of the board for the Institute of Quantum Computing.

From the department of combinatorics and optimization comes word that the 2006 Canadian Mathematical Society Doctoral Prize, which recognizes outstanding performance by a doctoral student, has been awarded to a UW graduate, Mike Newman. Newman graduated last year with a PhD in C&O, supervised by faculty member Chris Godsil. He currently holds an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at Queen Mary College, University of London. Newman will receive his award and give a prize lecture at the CMS winter meeting in December in Toronto. According to the CMS announcement, he "wrote an outstanding dissertation which presents extensions and applications of the Delsarte-Hoffman bound on the size of independent sets in graphs. The thesis interweaves the solutions of three intriguing yet ostensibly unrelated problems into a unified tapestry by virtue of their common methodological treatment."

Staff and faculty members received individually addressed copies of Moods magazine this week, and they have the Employee Assistance Program to thank for it. Johan Reis of counselling services, who chairs the EAP committee, says the Mississauga-based glossy quarterly is being supplied to UW at "a penny a copy", meaning it cost EAP about $30 to blanket the campus. The new issue has articles ranging from "Depression in Spouse Caregivers" to "Being Your Child's Academic Advocate" — not to mention something that might possibly touch one or two readers at UW, "Dealing with Change in the Workplace".

A web page that shows the major university rankings by Maclean's magazine year by year back to 1991 has now been updated with UW's 2006 showing. . . . Gunther Witzke, a custodian in UW's plant operations department since 1985, will officially retire December 1. . . . Friends send word that Marko Dumancic, a well-known figure in the MAD house (that's the Mapping, Analysis and Design unit in environmental studies), is marking a landmark birthday this weekend. . . .

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Carol Ann Weaver (left, in red) and Rebecca Campbell (lower right, in blonde) led a group of 13 UW students on a music-and-culture tour of South Africa for 18 days in May. They encountered "African jazz and Western classical concerts, Afrobeat dance halls, the famed all-night Isicathimiya choral competition . . . homes, markets, malls, sugar plantations, the Indian Ocean."

CD and concert of Mennonite song

The child victims of a gunman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, earlier this fall will be remembered Saturday night at "a Very Special CD Release Concert Remembering Five Amish Girls", to be held Saturday night in the chapel at Conrad Grebel University College.

Admission is free to the 8 p.m. concert by Carol Ann Weaver and Rebecca Campbell, and to a reception with Mennonite traditional food afterwards. The concert, says Weaver, who is a music professor at Grebel, "includes a special candlelight Lobsang for the Amish girls and a spirited new song 'A Cappella' for Kiera and the Amish girls".

The event as a whole is a launch for Weaver and Campbell's new CD, "Thistle & Jewel", which will be for sale at $20, with proceeds going towards MCC Amish School Recovery Fund.

Says Weaver: "Thistle & Jewel is a collection of my songs based on poetry of Mennonite-rooted poets — Americans Julia Kasdorf, Jeff Gundy, Ann Hostetler, and the young Canadian Kiera Schneider. Sometimes our own stories are hardest to tell, our own songs hardest to sing — both the thistles and the jewels. But these writers playfully, whimsically, and colourfully transform normal days into miracles, ordinary farm landscapes into visionary places, modest housewives into frenetically crazy cooks, and plain Amish houses into raucous marble-roller arcades. Respectfully and sometimes irreverently, the songs deal with the humour, piety, earthiness, work-and-play, aspirations, wonder, imagination and beauty found within this unique cultural setting. The music joyfully incorporates sounds from a shared cultural Mennonite heritage — the quietness and space, the urgent busyness, the make-believe worlds created by children sitting through long Sunday morning sermons.

"And somehow vocalist Rebecca Campbell (never of Mennonite background!) matches each
nuance, breathing resplendent and rollicking life into this music!

"But the day before the CD arrived, five Amish girls met with tragedy in Pennsylvania, and suddenly the meaning of thistles became more than real. On that bitter evening of October 2 I found myself writing a Lobsang for these girls which we will sing at the concert. We are touched and amazed by the strength, dignity and love of the Amish families at this time of grief, and want to remember them. From thistles their overwhelming gift of forgiveness emerges as a radiant jewel."

CAR

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