Half a dozen co-op students spent eight weeks during the spring 2009 term taking part in the Encouraging Dynamic Global Entrepreneurs program, sponsored by a government agency in Scotland. They joined consulting teams of Scottish university and high school students who assisted small businesses with their growth plans. “Culture and business go hand in hand,” reports political science student Margaret Cichosz Grzyb. “It’s important to understand where certain people are coming from, and not make assumptions.” The six are profiled in a fall issue of the Inside Scoop newsletter published online for co-op students.

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First offers made for September admission

Hundreds of Ontario high school students have already been offered admission to UW for September 2010, while thousands more are anxiously studying websites and brochures this month as the main application deadline draws near.

In the end, UW can expect some 30,000 applications, the bulk of them from Ontario teens, on the way to filling a first-year class of a little more than 5,000 students next fall. But those numbers disguise a stunning variety in programs, student backgrounds, requirements, schedules and competitive advantages.

The whole process is managed by UW’s marketing and undergraduate recruitment office, which provides information and enticements, and the admissions office, which cooperates with the faculties and academic departments to see that the right applicants are chosen for the right programs.

In between the two comes the Ontario Universities Application Centre, housed in Guelph, which processes applications electronically for all the province’s universities. It’s OUAC that defines January 13, 2010, as the main deadline date for current Ontario high school students to submit their university applications.

For students outside Ontario, the official deadline date is March 31, with earlier dates specified in certain programs — March 1 for engineering, for example. “If a program is not yet full, the application deadline may be extended,” the admissions web site notes. “Applications received after the deadline will be processed only if spaces are available.”

But there was nothing to stop students from applying well ahead of time, and that’s why Nancy Weiner, associate registrar (admissions), was able to report last week that 992 students have been sent offers of admission. “The majority of the 992 admits have been sent an offer email,” Weiner says in a memo, “and their offer packages are already in the mail.”

Most of the students admitted this early are high-flyers: “Out of the 992 offers for fall 2010, 500 have current grades that indicate 90% or higher and 387 have grades between 85 and 89.9%. Compared to last year at this time for fall 2009 entry, UW sent 755 offers.” More than half this year’s offers, 502, have gone from the faculty of science, and most of the rest from arts, with a scattering from math, environment and applied health sciences. Just 7 offers have gone from engineering, none of them to Ontario secondary school students.

Weiner is estimating that the offers sent so far to Ontario students amount to 5 per cent of the total that UW will eventually make. “UW will continue to make rolling offers of admission at the end of January and early February.”

Many of the students who receive offers of application won’t make up their mind until they have an actual visit to the campus. Tours are offered by the visitor centre all through the winter and spring, but the big day for visiting students (and family members) will be the open house that’s traditionally held on the Tuesday of the schools’ March break. This year that’s March 16.

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Prof's new look at the four dimensions

Copyright © PhysOrg.com, republished with permission. The original article is available online.

Spacetime, which consists of three dimensions of space and one time dimension, is such a large, abstract concept that scientists have a very difficult time understanding and defining it. Moreover, different theories offer different, contradictory insights on spacetime’s structure. While general relativity describes spacetime as a continuous manifold, quantum field theories require spacetime to be made of discrete points. Unifying these two theories into one theory of quantum gravity is currently one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics.

In an attempt to better understand spacetime, mathematical physicist Achim Kempf of the University of Waterloo has proposed a new possible structure of spacetime on the Planck scale. He suggests that spacetime could be both discrete and continuous at the same time, conceivably satisfying general relativity and quantum field theories simultaneously. Kempf’s proposal is inspired by information theory, since information can also be simultaneously discrete and continuous. His study is published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

“There are fiercely competing schools of thought, each with good arguments, about whether spacetime is fundamentally discrete (as, for example, in spin foam models) or continuous (as, for example, in string theory),” Kempf told PhysOrg.com. “The new information-theoretic approach could enable one to build conceptual as well as mathematical bridges between these two schools of thought.”

As Kempf explains, the underlying mathematical structure of information theory in this framework is sampling theory - that is, samples taken at a generic discrete set of points can be used to reconstruct the shape of the information (or spacetime) everywhere down to a specific cutoff point. In the case of spacetime, that cutoff would be the natural ultraviolet lower bound, if it exists. This lower bound can also be thought of as a minimum length uncertainty principle, beyond which structural properties cannot be precisely known.

In his study, Kempf develops a sampling theory that can be generalized to apply to spacetime. He shows that a finite density of sample points obtained throughout spacetime’s structure can provide scientists with the shape of spacetime from large length scales all the way down to the natural ultraviolet cutoff. Further, he shows that this expression establishes an equivalence between discrete and continuous representations of spacetimes. As such, the new framework for the sampling and reconstruction of spacetime could be used in various approaches to quantum gravity by giving discrete structures a continuous representation.

“It is exceedingly hard to obtain experimental data that could guide the search for the theory that unifies quantum theory and general relativity,” Kempf said. “The proposal that spacetime is simultaneously continuous and discrete in the same way that information is may be able to serve as a theoretical guiding principle. It points towards a theory in which all natural processes are seen as possessing what is in effect a universal finite bandwidth.”

Kempf added that, at the very least, the new approach provides some practical technical tools for studies in quantum gravity, such as solving discrete problems and using continuum methods. In the future, Kempf plans to apply the new methods to a variety of problems.

“I am planning to use the new information-theoretic methods to tackle afresh certain long-standing information-theoretic questions in quantum gravity, such as the black hole information loss paradox and the question of the role of the holographic principle in quantum field theory,” Kempf said.

CAR

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