'Waterloo is honoured to be hosting Team China’s women’s Olympic hockey team for an exhibition game," said Bob Copeland, UW director of athletics. Carl Pawlowski got the photo as the Chinese players lined up before facing the Warriors on October 14 at the Columbia Icefield. Team China is training at The Sports Village in Vaughan, north of Toronto, until the end of October. They will also visit Finland and Edmonton before the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver in February. China won the Waterloo game 8-2. "Our players learned a lot about playing international hockey," says Warrior coach Geraldine Heaney.

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'Really proud' of UW's rising ranking

UW is the 113th-best university in the world, according to a respected British source — and moving on up the list, according to an ebullient David Johnston, the university’s president.

“Reputation lags reality by five or ten years,” Johnston told the campus “town hall” meeting on Tuesday, suggesting that UW’s jump up the list from 128th place last year to 113th in 2009 could well happen again — and again.

“I’m really proud of what we produce in this publicly funded university with very, very limited resources,” the president said, quoting figures he has often brought out before: UW has about $11,000 per student to spend each year, the University of Michigan $25,000, Princeton or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in excess of $100,000.

The result of such a funding advantage is that if he were doing his own rankings of the world’s universities, most of the top 25 institutions would be from the United States, and nearly all of them “private” rather than government-funded, Johnston said.

The top 25 institutions in the Times Higher Education QS World University Rankings 2009, published this month, include 13 American institutions, six British, two from Japan, and one each from Australia, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Canada. The Canadian institution that makes that grade is McGill, in 18th place.

The Times puts Harvard first in the world, Cambridge second and Yale third. “American supremacy seems to be slipping,” the editors write in the October 8 issue of Times Higher Education, “amid improved showings by institutions in Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Malaysia.”

Canada also dropped, from 12 institutions in the top 200 last year to 11 this year. In order, they are McGill, Toronto, British Columbia, Alberta, Montréal, Waterloo, Queen’s, McMaster, Calgary, Western, and Simon Fraser. That puts UW in sixth position among Canadian universities, in a ranking done by experts with a global viewpoint.

Separately, the Times ranks the world’s top 50 universities for their work in engineering and information technology, putting MIT first and Berkeley second. In that table, UW is ranked 27th in the world, with Toronto, UBC and McGill coming in higher.

Waterloo doesn’t figure in the top-50 lists for life sciences and biomedicine, natural sciences, social sciences, or arts and humanities. McGill and Toronto are on all four lists.

Exactly where a university is ranked on any list depends on the criteria used. The Times says its ratings are based on “a mixture of quantitative indicators and informed opinion”, with the emphasis on research excellence (citations in the scholarly literature), teaching excellence (measured by student-faculty ratio), “international outlook” and a peer review survey.

In UW’s academic planning there isn’t a formal statement of exactly where Waterloo should rank among Canadian universities, but top administrators have been heard to say that “in the top five” is a goal. The Sixth Decade plan does say that by 2017, “all departments/ schools will rank in the top 25% in Canada ... at least 12 UW academic programs will be the best in North America ... UW will re-affirm its position as the leading co-operative education university in the world.”

As for reputation, Waterloo ranks 10th in “top-of-mind awareness” among Canadians from coast to coast, according to an Ipsos Reid survey conducted last year.

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Chills coming off the Espresso machine

A select audience will get the pre-Hallowe’en shivers tonight at the launch of the UW bookstore’s Campus Chills.

It’s a collection of scary stories jointly released by three Canadian campus bookstores that have their own “print on demand” book machines: Waterloo, McMaster and Alberta. Locally, the spooky reading event will be held starting at 9 p.m. in the South Campus Hall bookstore. Admission is free, but participants need to register online.

"It's the first time that a print-on-demand new fiction book was created exclusively for the three campus bookstores with contributions from distinguished authors who are all alumni of Canadian universities," says Kathryn Fedy, marketing co-ordinator for UW’s retail services. "The stories are original and never-before-published stories that the authors have written exclusively for the first edition of Campus Chills."

The book will be printed exclusively on the Espresso Book Machines located in each of the campus bookstores — massive copy-and-bind devices that can print, bind and trim a high quality paperback book (contents, four-colour covers and all) at a low cost, and in minutes, from digital files.

"The Espresso Book Machine has revolutionized the traditional textbook supply chain for book distribution," said May Yan, director of retail services, when the machine arrived last spring. "We will be able to offer options to students and faculty that will be cost effective and options for customized textbooks that will never be out of stock."

The Espresso machine is made by a New York based company called On Demand Books, and cost in the neighbourhood of $200,000. "Students will be the main beneficiaries,” said Randy Dauphin, the bookstore information systems specialist, “because the EBM makes it possible to distribute almost every book published, including out-of-print titles, easily and quickly at huge savings on print runs under 500 copies depending on the size of the book and the copyright costs.”

While ghost stories and other brand-new books are a possible Espresso product, the machine is mostly expected to be turning out course materials. In an example cited by the UW bookstore, a particular McGraw Hill accounting textbook, for example, costs $192 for the full version of the book. By selecting only the required chapters of the book that students need to read, the instructor customizes the textbook and the price is reduced to $89 based on the number of pages printed and payments to the copyright owner.

Participants in tonight’s event will actually see Campus Chills coming off the machine, and will then be escorted for a book reading at “a secret location” that is the setting for one of the stories written by the three Waterloo alumni authors: Julie E. Czerneda (science, 1977); James Alan Gardner (mathematics, 1976; and Douglas Smith (math, 1975).

The bookstore will have the book for sale to other customers tomorrow. Its introduction is by Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, who received a Hugo award for Wake. A total of thirteen alumni authors from the three institutions have contributed original stories for the Campus Chills anthology. All the stories are set on Canadian campuses and feature what the bookstore is calling “speculative fiction on the darker side”.

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Other notes in the October glow

Monday's meeting of the UW senate postponed a decision on starting fall term classes earlier than in the past — typically on the Thursday right after Labour Day, rather than the following Monday. The change would have implications for orientation, which would start on the Saturday of Labour Day weekend and run through Wednesday, then resume with events Friday night and Saturday. Student senators asked to have the issue delayed to next month's meeting to allow time for more consultation, and said students aren't happy with the implications of the change, even if the recent "orientation review" committee said it "could work with" the revised schedule if necessary. I'll have more about the senate discussion in the Daily Bulletin in a day or two.

On campus this morning are a group of school guidance counsellors from Waterloo Region "and a few who travel from farther away", says Jody Berringer, manager of liaison and visits in the marketing and undergraduate recruitment office. They "will be joining us for a morning of great food and relevant information sharing. They will have the opportunity to meet our recruitment and admission specialists, to have their individual questions answered, and to learn more about student engagement and the transition from high school to university. Each year we look forward to personally hosting our partners from the guidance community as a way to thank them for their continued support and to share with them exciting news from Waterloo."

The president of Microsoft's business division, Stephen Elop, will be at UW tonight to give a special public talk about the future of technology and innovation. The event, open to students and faculty, will start at 6 p.m. in the Humanities Theatre. All those in attendance will be entered in a draw for an Xbox 360 gift pack. "Stephen Elop's visit as part of a tour of select campuses confirms that the University of Waterloo is the source for bright young talent," says Peggy Jarvie, executive director of co-operative education and career services. As president of the Microsoft business division, Elop oversees groups that include responsibility for the Microsoft Office system of programs, servers and software-based services, and he's expected to talk about the new Office 2010 software. He joined Microsoft in January 2008 and is a member of the company's senior leadership team that sets overall strategy and direction. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer engineering and management from McMaster University.

Some 24 Aboriginal high school students and three counsellors from northern and remote First Nations communities in Ontario are at St. Paul’s University College this week for the fourth UW DIRECTIONS conference — where the title stands for Developing Indigenous Readiness (for) Educational Career Training (using) Innovative Opportunities N’ Strategies. In other words, says Emerance Baker of the Aboriginal students office, the program “provides Aboriginal learners with a vision of themselves in post-secondary. We are focused on ESTEEM: Engineering, Science, Technology, Education, Environment and Mathematics.” But not everything is about university: “The conference provides students with hands-on learning about all levels of postsecondary training and studies, giving them the directions needed to pursue university, college, trades or apprenticeships. We also provide them with life-skills experiences which will help them reach their current goal of completing high school or direct them on a career path they might never have considered. By working in partnership with the youth and their community leaders, we are providing a solid basis for our youth to gain education information and employment readiness training that will allow them to return to their home communities and work locally to support the sustainability of their home communities.”

The department of earth and environmental sciences will hold this year’s Farvolden Lectures tomorrow — latest in a series meant to foster interaction among the department, its hydrogeology alumni and others working in the field of groundwater. Farvolden Day begins with a symposium on groundwater research (registration fee $75, or $15 for students). John Petrie, principal of Golder Associates Limited, will speak on “Challenges of Developing Additional Municipal Groundwater Supplies in the Waterloo-Guelph Area”, and earth sciences professor Shaun Frape will speak on “From the Canadian Shield to the Fennoscandian Shield to Greenland: 30 years of research experience in deep crystalline groundwaters”. The afternoon brings a free public lecture by distinguished professor emeritus John Cherry, “ A Glimpse at Groundwater Contamination in China”. “This talk is based on what I have learned during travel and scientific collaborations in China during the past seven years,” says Cherry. “China is still very much a developing country in terms of water and other environmental issues, with a large and growing dependency on groundwater. There are expanding problems of inadequate water quantity and quality due to rapid industrialization, intensive agriculture, population growth and other pressures.” Graduate students are also invited to participate in a networking event with academic and industry leaders at a reception following the lecture.

“Each year,” Wanda Speek writes from UW’s human resources department, “the Bridging the Gap Pre-Retirement Program offers spring and fall sessions to help those who are planning for retirement. The sessions are held at the Rockway Centre on King Street East in Kitchener. The fall sessions this year have been changed from the usual six weeknights to two Saturday sessions, October 24 and November 14, 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Topics over the two days will include Planning Today Tomorrow; Changing Roles and Relationships; Making the Most of Your Time; Taking Charge of Your Health; Financial and Legal Affairs; Housing a Place to Grow. Cost is $64.80 per person, plus GST. For more information or to register, please contact Wendy Fifield at 519-741-2576.”

CAR

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