More than 1,300 stars at convocation

UW's Ninety-Third Convocation tomorrow will celebrate the graduation of more than 1,300 students, as a total of 855 undergraduate degrees and diplomas and 532 graduate degrees will be presented at morning and afternoon ceremonies in UW's Physical Activities Complex.

The ceremony for arts, independent studies, social work and applied health sciences will start at 10 a.m. The afternoon session, for the other faculties and programs, begins at 2 p.m.

Among the new graduates are some well-known figures on campus, such as Becky Wroe, former president of the Federation of Students and now on the Federation’s professional staff, receiving a BSc, and Jennifer (Johnson) Richardson, a staff member in marketing and undergraduate recruitment, receiving a BA in liberal studies.

There will be special honours for two graduate students tomorrow, with the presentation of the alumni gold medals that are given annually to the top PhD student and master’s student.

The winner at the doctoral level is Lukasz Golab, receiving his PhD in computer science. Now a researcher at AT&T Laboratories, Golab is being honoured for a thesis titled “Sliding Window Query Processing over Data Streams”, supervised by Tamer Öszu.

The master’s level winner is Evan Frank Risko, who completed an MA in psychology and is now in the PhD program. His thesis, “The Proportion Valid Effect in Spatial Cueing: A Compound-Cue Account”, was supervised by Jennifer Stolz and Derek Besner.

"Outstanding achievement in graduate studies" awards will be presented to Michael James MacLellan, kinesiology; Gbemisola Adebimpe Abimbola, management sciences; Erin Tace Nelson, geography; and Kevin Matthew Regan, computer science, all at the master's level; and Bruce Alexander Dadey, English; Hai Jiang, electrical and computer engineering; and Stephanie Johanna DeWitte-Orr, biology, at the PhD level.

At the morning session of convocation, Andrea Kidd, of Blind River, Ontario, will receive the James D. Leslie Prize for academic excellence in UW's distance education program. Kidd, who graduated with a BA last spring, will receive the $500 award for having achieved a first-class standing while earning 50 per cent or more of her degree credits through distance education courses.

Also at the morning ceremony, retired political science professor Ashok Kapur will be given the title of distinguished professor emeritus. In the afternoon ceremony, retired faculty members John Reeve, of electrical and computer engineering, and John Vanderkooy, of physics, will receive distinguished professor emeritus titles.

Speaker at the morning event is the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, who will be awarded a doctor of laws degree. Also at the morning ceremony, author and UW graduate George Elliott Clarke will receive a doctor of letters (DLitt) degree, and health promotion innovator Larry Green will receive a doctor of science degree.

More honorary degrees will be awarded at the afternoon ceremony for graduates in the faculties of engineering, environmental studies, mathematics and science. Pierre Borne, a top French expert in the field of systems engineering, continuous systems and discrete event systems, will receive a doctor of engineering (DEng) and address the graduates. James Murray, a pioneer in the field of mathematical biology, will receive a doctor of mathematics degree. And Marilyn Jacox, scientist emeritus of the U.S. National Institutes of Standards and Technology, will receive a doctor of science degree.

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English prof studies medical language

A UW expert in rhetoric heads a study into links between language and how health-care professionals conduct themselves in their dealings with patients and other professionals. Catherine Schryer (left), a professor of English language and literature, is researching the impacts of health-care communications, asking if something vital gets lost when a doctor explains an illness to a patient.

Schryer said the research project, Crossing Borders: Sites of Discursive Negotiation in Healthcare Practice, consists of three case studies, each investigating the role that a genre or a distinctive pattern plays in facilitating or not communication between different health-care professionals. As a rhetorician (a specialist in the study into how language is used), she does not confine her academic activities to the works of poets, dramatists and novelists. Rather, she has extended the field of English studies to include among other things, research into how language is applied.

Schryer, who is also director of UW's teaching resources office, is the principal investigator of the project, sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Project co-investigators are Lorelei Lingard, of the University of Toronto's faculty of medicine, and Marlee Spafford, of UW's school of optometry.

The project's first case study explores the production and reception of referral letters between optometrists and ophthalmologists. The second one investigates the production of reports by pediatricians in a child abuse prevention clinic and the reception of those reports by social workers, police, lawyers and judges. The third studies the role that electronic medical records play in team communication situations in a cancer care clinic.

“Our program of study aims to connect research in health professions education to recent research in the role of language practices in the professional workplace,” she says. “What we are finding is that when the members of these professions transfer information from their patients or clients to other professionals, they rearrange it.” She said doctors, for instance, ask patients to describe their problems and then restate that information in professional terms as they pass it on to consulting specialists, such as internists, oncologists and cardiac specialists.

Medical practitioners have special ways of relaying information about their observations, results of lab tests and diagnoses, to other practitioners, along with outlining the plans they have formulated for patients, including drug prescriptions, fitness programs, dietary changes and surgical procedures.

For example, a patient tells the doctor about an illness. The doctor immediately translates what the patient says into language that would be more meaningful to a medical professional, including a specialist to whom the patient may subsequently be referred. Such case reports differ considerably from the way in which a patient first gives information to his or her doctor. “They almost never present cases in the order in which the patients have reported on their health or injury problems,” Schryer says, adding that medical professionals only deal with details that have clear relevance to the case.

“The entire process has become something of a genre —- a distinctive pattern,” she said. “The advantage of the translation done by the doctor is that it enables him or her to transmit information rapidly and accurately to other doctors.” But something always gets lost in the translation, including sometimes the ability to explain to the patient in their own terms the nature of their illness or injury.

Schryer wonders about some of the consequences: Is something lost, at times, when the patient's story is reconstructed? Might there be problems later on because the patient fails to understand what the doctor is telling him or her to do?

When her research team looked at the way language is used in doctors' case reports, they noticed language that seemed to turn the patient into a kind of object. “Doctors do need to keep some distance between themselves and their patients,” Schryer said. “However, the case presentation system may tend to objectify patients. The medical professional may refer to patients not as the 'people in such-and-such ward' but as the 'cystic fibroses in such-and-such ward' or refer to child patients' mothers collectively as 'the moms'.”

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And a few other notes today

October is Canadian Library Month — apparently a week, which was the observance in previous years, wasn’t long enough to say everything that needed to be said about libraries. The electronic newsletter produced by UW’s library is marking the occasion with a contest: “Anyone who has ever read, written, and/or published information understands how empowering literacy is. Published works from around the world are constantly under scrutiny, criticism, and occasionally censored for the content presented. Canada is no exception when it comes to course readings, curriculum, and library collections being challenged. Our mission statement supports the Library's commitment to upholding a number of values, including equitable access and intellectual freedom. The books available at the Library are selected and/or recommended based on academic merit and are made available to enhance the research, teaching, and learning endeavours undertaken by our faculty and students. The Contest Question: Provide 10 titles from the 100 titles listed in the 2004 Freedom to Read Challenged Books List that are available at the UW Library (including the Federated and Affiliated College Libraries).” Details are, of course, online. And so is a list of “13 interesting pieces of library trivia” tracing the UW library back to 1957.

Movie stars as "ambassadors", musicians influencing international policy: call it celebrity diplomacy. Andrew Cooper (left) of UW's political science department, the Centre on Foreign Policy and Federalism, and also the Centre for International Governance Innovation, has something to say about that recent trend in world affairs, and said it yesterday to Daiene Vernile of CTV. The interview will be aired on "ProvinceWide" Sunday night at 6:30.

Start putting one foot in front of the other, and pretty soon you're exercising. That's the idea behind the Weekly Wellness Walks that will be sponsored by the Employee Assistance Program, starting this coming week. People will meet at noon each Wednesday in front of Needles Hall, hear a few fitness tips, then start walking. (The announcement of the program doesn't say just how far the walk will be, but for what it's worth, the distance around the main campus ring road is 2.65 kilometres, or 1.65 miles.) The fitness tips come from Healthy Weights, a local agency closely linked to the kinesiology department in UW's faculty of applied health sciences, and the walks will be supervised by kin students, the EAP organizers say. "Did you know," they add, "that adding regular short bouts of walking to your busy schedule can help reduce the risks of many chronic health problems even in the absence of weight loss?"

Greg Glinka, a Waterloo mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor, has been nominated to the title of honorary professor by the faculty of automotive and construction machinery engineering at Warsaw University of Technology, in Poland. Glinka is recognized for his outstanding achievements in the fatigue design of machine structures.

The Centre for Contact Lens Research, based in UW's school of optometry, is conducting "a dry eye study requiring post-menopausal women who do not wear contact lenses. Time commitment is 45 minutes." More information is available at ext. 3-7312 or e-mail rexton@uwaterloo.ca.

The graduate recruitment test for the Public Service of Canada is being administered on campus tomorrow. . . . A podcast of the recent Humanities Theatre talk by Stephen Lewis is now available on the Diversity Campaign web site. . . . The Pennsylvania College of Optometry, one of just 17 accredited optometry schools in the United States, boasts that five UW graduates are among its new first-year students this fall. . . .

CAR

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