Return to Waterloo: summer's over

I’m back on campus after three weeks away, and catching up on the events of August, including the latest triumphs of the student Alternative Fuels Team, but also including a series of nerve-racking interruptions to UW’s Internet connection. I imagine we’ll eventually hear technical details of what went wrong; last week, when I was in distant parts and trying to peek at my e-mail every so often, I just knew that sometimes Waterloo’s servers were responding and sometimes they weren’t. And then of course the explanation appeared in the Daily Bulletin, which my colleague Pat Bow delivered to readers each morning as things developed. Likely I am the only person who’s ever read the Daily Bulletin on a cellphone while eating lobster pizza beside the Spruce Creek estuary on the coast of southern Maine.

In the course of travels across a swath of the American northeast and midwest, I wasn’t doing anything work-related but I did visit a few campuses. One brief but memorable stop was at the Illini Union, the centrepiece of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an architectural classic built just before the Second World War. Walk into the oaken lobby and you’re greeted by a plaque that honours the Illinois officials who built the Union, including an unexpectedly familiar name. Thus I learned that Oscar G. Mayer was chairman of the Board of Trustees in 1939, and was reminded that meat-packing is one of Illinois’ fundamental industries. I don’t claim to have explored the Union, let alone the Illinois campus, in any detail, but I was there long enough to buy a cup of coffee — and a cinnamon bun so big that I was still nibbling it in Indiana.

My most important campus visit on the trip, however, was to the University of Kansas, beautiful atop Mount Oread in Lawrence, which rises a majestic 200 feet above the nearby river. KU was the first university with which I ever had any connection, and I was revisiting the scenes of my youth, including the historic Dyche Museum of natural history and the elegant Campanile with its 53 bells. One KU tradition has disappeared, I learned. For decades, the “university whistle” sounded its mighty toot at 20 minutes past every hour, and it was standard practice for students to walk out of class the moment the whistle signalled that time was up. But the whistle is no more. A couple of years ago the ancient machinery cracked, and what’s left of it is now on display in a glass case.

Waterloo has neither whistle nor campanile. On the other hand, we’re doing some impressive things with alternative fuels (and also, I learned from last Thursday’s Daily Bulletin, something called terahertz imaging). And only Waterloo can claim to be the world’s top intelligent community this year. It’s good to be home.

As I return, the fall term is just about here; students will be arriving over the Labour Day weekend and through next week, with classes scheduled to begin September 10. We'll be hearing details shortly about the orientation week for new first-year students, which starts Monday and will include such traditional fixtures as Monte Carlo Night, Black and Gold Day, and the Saturday night toga party, plus low-key getting-to-know-you activities, tours and briefings. All new students are also expected to see this year's production of the customary "Single and Sexy" play, updated with references to the latest delicate issues — this year including "academic integrity".

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City gives okay to Balsillie site

Using words like "unique," "historic," "world-class", "pearl", and "gem" to describe it, Waterloo city council has overwhelmingly endorsed the plan to turn over city-owned land to the new Balsillie School for International Affairs to be located beside the Centre for International Governance Innovation on Erb Street.

A contingent of supporters from both local universities, including UW president David Johnston and outgoing Wilfrid Laurier University president Bob Rosehart, was at last night’s meeting to make sure council knew of its importance to the academic community, as well as the school's potential to transform Canada's role in the world and make it a centre for political and international research. "Waterloo is developing a unique higher learning and research cluster in the centre of the city . . . continuing the transition from grain to brain . . . that will make it the envy of cities across North America," said Johnston.

Quoting from dean of arts Ken Coates's previous comments on the school, Johnston said: "Imagine the vitality and economic returns brought to uptown Waterloo by all this activity," because the centre will draw scholars from around the globe to study here, shining a spotlight on the city, drawing hundreds or thousands of visitors each year. UW history professor John English, executive director of CIGI, said it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that could help transform the city into a magnet for international scholarship that would have an impact on its civil service and give insight into some of the world's most pressing problems.

Council was making a decision on the proposal to provide a site for the school from the so-called “Seagram Lands” near the corner of Erb and Father David Bauer Drive, the former site of the historic Seagram distillery. The arrangement, on a long-term lease basis, had raised some controversy because it means foregoing the property tax revenue that the city would earn if the site was developed for commercial purposes instead.

Rick Haldenby, director of the UW school of architecture, talked about the potential to build a unique facility that would "transform" the city core, making it even more of a place for people to come, live and learn. Mayor Brenda Halloran said the school is an "historic" opportunity — "we're on the cusp of something great" — and that it would help continue to transform the city for future generations. The principal private benefactor, Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of Research In Motion, told council it should grab the chance because "these are the issues of our time" and council has the unique chance to help transform the world as the opportunity is here, "because we can."

The project, to be open in 2009, calls for a facility of about 25,000 square feet with potential to expand, with room for about 40 graduate students (20 at each university) and 30 PhD students. It’s to be administered jointly by WLU and UW.

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Light helps spot malaria parasite

Melanie Campbell (right) of UW’s department of physics will tell colleagues in the Optical Society of America next month about research on using light to improve the diagnosis of malaria, a disease that kills more than a million people a year worldwide.

Campbell is among the speakers at “Frontiers in Optics 2007”, the 91st annual meeting of the OSA, which will be held September 16-20 in San Jose, California, alongside Laser Science XXIII, the annual meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Laser Science.

A news release from the OSA explains her work on Detecting Malaria with Light: “It is now possible to analyze large tissue samples for signs of malaria with much greater detail and accuracy.

“To do this, scientists at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada and Spain's University of Murcia used a Macroscope, a patented technology developed by Biomedical Photometrics Inc., which enables imaging of much larger tissue samples at a very high resolution – in this case tissue infected with malaria. Using their new patented method and the Macroscope, the researchers measured tell-tale changes in the polarization of light reflecting off a sample of infected tissue.

“The malaria parasite changes the polarization of light, and this has been exploited to measure population density in blood samples using polarimetry. Melanie Campbell, a researcher at the University of Waterloo and immediate past president of the Canadian Association of Physicists, and her colleagues have extended this approach to analyzing tissue samples. They looked at both infected and normal tissue in their experiments, and used a confocal laser scanning Macroscope to measure changes in polarization and highlight the levels of malaria parasites in the tissue samples. By using the Macroscope to image larger tissue samples at higher resolutions, the severity of infection by the malaria parasite may be accurately quantified.

“The technique allows large areas to be imaged in a single scan as opposed to the smaller field available with a traditional microscope. This avoids time-consuming‘stitching’ of a large number of smaller images and increases data accuracy. Not only could this new approach improve the assessment of the severity of cases of malaria, but it could be extended to assessing different tissues infected with other kinds of biological abnormalities– possibly including proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease – that also interact with polarized light.”

The formal title of Campbell’s paper will be “Confocal Polarimetry Measurements of Tissue Infected with Malaria”.

Other presentations at next month’s conference will include one from the University of Southern California, where researchers are developing a tiny camera for prosthetic systems that can be implanted directly into the human eye and connected to the retina, the part of the eye that converts visual information into electric signals that travel to the brain. “Such an implantable camera would represent an important milestone in the ultimate goal of providing limited vision to those rendered blind by certain diseases, via a fully implantable retinal prosthetic device,” the OSA says.

Uniting more than 70,000 professionals from 134 countries, the Optical Society of America has worked since 1916 to advance the interests of the field. Its publications, events, technical groups and programs foster optics knowledge and scientific collaboration for the scientists, engineers and business leaders who work in the field, promoting the science of light and the advanced technologies made possible by optics and photonics.

CAR

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