What was 'Union Station' at St. Jerome's University is expanded and improved, and a new name is to be announced shortly. Dana Woito, director of mission and communications for St. Jerome's, says a ribbon-cutting event for the new coffee shop will be held some time in October. "This new coffee shop is a joint venture with Chartwells (Compass Group Canada), and we're hoping it will be an especially welcoming place for off-campus students who might be looking for a place to have lunch or a coffee or simply hang out between classes." It'll be open 9 to 9 Monday to Thursday, 9 to 4 on Fridays.

Back to top

Considering an extra Internet link

After a series of interruptions to UW’s Internet service, including one in August that lasted almost a full night and day, the information systems and technology department is exploring the possibility of a second link from the campus network to the outside world.

“The campus network still includes single points of failure and a dependence on a single internet service provider,” says Bruce Campbell, director of network services in IST. “Work is ongoing to increase fault tolerance in critical areas of the campus network, and we are about to issue an RFP (Request For Proposal) for a backup/secondary internet service provider.”

Except for a couple of small links with local Internet providers, UW streams all its Internet traffic, from e-mail to data downloads, through Orion, the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network, operated by the province’s universities and other major institutions. The “core router” in the Math and Computer building, which manages the campus network, is connected to an external router, which is connected to Orion, which is connected to the commercial network Cogent, which links to Internet users near and far. “Cogent's nearest point of presence is in Toronto,” Campbell notes. “We lease a vlan from Orion to connect UW to that point of presence.

“A failure of the core in MC, our external router, Orion, or Cogent, all would have the effect of cutting UW off from the world.”

And that’s what has happened several times recently. During the summer, “the first failure was caused by construction crew severing fibre optic cable in Kitchener,” Campbell recalls. “The second and third failures occurred while Orion was attempting to deploy some new technology to increase resilience to failures, ironically.

“Saturday’s failure was unrelated to Orion. It was caused when one of UW's core routers crashed, and required manual intervention to restore. Investigation is in progress.” That breakdown affected communications across campus, from about 2 a.m. to 10 a.m., as well as external connection: e-mail wasn’t coming or going, and people couldn’t reach UW’s web sites.

“In order to have a truly redundant backup/secondary internet service provider,” says Campbell, “we'd need both a provider, and a way to connect UW to that provider (unless they have a point of presence in Waterloo already). And we'd need an additional external router, connected to our other core router.”

Back to top

Young children get into the story

A new UW psychology study uses an innovative approach to show that preschoolers are capable of understanding the perspectives of story characters, reports a UW media release.

“Children around the ages of three to five are fairly limited in their verbal abilities and many previous studies have relied on methods requiring children to tell a story orally, potentially underestimating what they can do,” says lead researcher Daniela O’Neill, who did the study with graduate student Rebecca Shultis.

O’Neill, an associate professor of developmental psychology and head of the UW Centre for Child Studies, says that’s why the study introduced a new way to look at children’s storytelling ability. “In essence, rather than looking at how children are able to tell stories, it looked at how children understand stories, and whether, like adults, children are able to build up a model of the story in their mind and ‘step into the mind,’ so to speak, of a character.”

The researchers had the children listen to a story about a character who was in one location, but was thinking about doing something in another. “Tracking the thoughts of characters to different locations they are thinking about is something we do very easily as adults and really is an impressive perspective-taking feat,” O’Neill says. “But can children also do this? It turns out that five-year-olds can, but that three-year-olds have much more difficulty doing this.” The youngest children tracked a character if he or she physically moved between two locations, but they did not seem able to track a change in location if it only happens in the character’s mind.

In the study, two models were placed in front of the children depicting the two locations — a barn and a field. In both locations there was a cow. Children were told that the character was in the barn, but was thinking about feeding the cow in the field. Then, immediately after this sentence, children were asked to point to the cow.

“This is an ambiguous request, since there are two cows present,” O’Neill explains. “But we hypothesized that if children were tracking the thought of the character to the thought-about location (the field), then they would point to the cow there. If they were only able to think about the character where the character physically is, then they would point to the cow in the barn.”

It turns out five-year-olds pointed to the cow in the thought-about location, while the three-year-olds pointed to the cow in the character’s physical location and only switched if told the character had actually gone to the other location.

“We are excited about these results because they help us to better understand how children’s narrative ability is changing and developing very early on in a new way we didn’t know about before, when studies focused mainly on having children tell stories, which they are really not very good at yet,” O’Neill says.

“Children with delays in their language use also often have difficulty with comprehending and producing narratives. This can become quite an issue once children reach school and are faced with many more tasks that require good story comprehension skills.”

The study potentially provides a new way to understand some of these difficulties and differences in perspective-taking ability that may hinder story comprehension and production. Entitled "The Emergence of the Ability to Track a Character’s Mental Perspective in Narrative", it was published in the July issue of Developmental Psychology.

Back to top

A few pixels in the big picture

The UW BookStore wants to know Who’s Reading What on Campus!” writes Kathryn King, marketing coordinator for retail services. "We are inviting all students, staff, and faculty to share the books they are reading with the campus community. Simply submit the book title, author, and any comments about the book by email to k4king@uwaterloo.ca. The wide variety of reading interests on campus and recommended titles, along with brief profiles of UW readers, will be showcased in a special section on our website. If you are ever searching for a good read, you’ll know where to look!"

The second annual "In the Mind's Eye" festival, which begins today, is not exactly about "substance abuse in films", as one newscast said the other day. Rather, it's about substance use and abuse, with the issues raised and illuminated by film as well as speakers, a total of some 50 events over the next few weeks. "All events except three dates at the Princess Twin Cinema are held free of charge (pay what you can)," a news release says, calling the festival "unique in North America . . . an exceptional opportunity". Canadian films are part of the festival along with films from Bolivia, China, Pakistan, Russia and so on — "this may be your only chance to see these films, many of which are premiere performances." The majority of festival events will be held at Kitchener Public Library, with a few ventures elsewhere, including showings at UW's Architecture building in Cambridge on November 5 and 19. Details of the community festival are, of course, online.

Jeff Spence writes from UW's department of psychology: " The Waterloo Employee Performance Evaluation Survey group (WEPES), a group of researchers, are looking for managers with performance appraisal experience to answer several open-ended questions about employee performance evaluations. Your answers will be used to guide the construction of a measure to be used in a future study. We are looking for individuals who have conducted (or are currently conducting) formal employee performance evaluations. As a participant, you would be asked to answer several questions about your beliefs regarding employee performance evaluations. Participation will take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, depending on your answers." The survey can be accessed online.

The staff association says there are about 15 spaces left on its November 9-11 shopping trip to Erie, Pennsylvania, with a reservation and payment deadline of September 28. • The UW Retirees Association will hold a one-day outing to Owen Sound ("on the trail of Tom Thomson") September 25, and its annual wine-and-cheese party is scheduled for September 27 at 3:00 at the University Club. • Robert Titze

Ontario University Athletics has named Luke Balch of the football Warriors as the latest Pioneer Petroleums Athlete of the Week, male variety. Says the OUA citation: "Balch, a 2nd year Recreation and Business student from London, Ontario, entered Saturday's game in the second quarter to help the Warriors come from behind to take an emotional win over 9th ranked Windsor 26-23. Luke completed 14 of 21 passes for 3 touchdowns, 0 interceptions and 229 yards, while rushing 7 times for 41 yards. The game winning TD was completed to DE Adam Kania playing TE with 24 seconds remaining in the game to steal the victory away from Windsor." That leaves the Warriors undefeated so far this season.

A chance to "experience a bit of refugee life" and learn about the camps for "internally displaced persons" in Darfur and Chad is planned for today, 10:00 to 12:30, in the Student Life Centre great hall. • Students who still aren't sure about their spring term marks will get the definitive answer Friday, the "fully graded date" on Quest. • Here's a reminder that the University Club is offering a "Welcome back 50th anniversary luncheon buffet" on Wednesday (reservations ext. 33801).

And . . . Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, campaigning to get his Liberals re-elected next month, was in Stratford last week and told his audience that the possibility of a UW campus in that little city is "a really exciting idea". He was particularly keen on the potential for education — and jobs — in digital media, one of the areas the Stratford outpost is expected to emphasize if it goes ahead. However, McGuinty "was noncommittal" about provincial funding for the project, the Beacon-Herald newspaper reports, "citing the need for formal discussions so everyone knows exactly what the potential is and what's being proposed".

CAR

Back to top