More than 400 new international students attended a reception in South Campus Hall last week to meet faculty members, staff members and each other. Maggie Xiaohui Liang of the international student office caught half a dozen of them in a photo: "Metz from the UK, Kevin from France, Jarmo from the Netherlands, Ziwei, Chang and Xu from China".

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Violence and harassment training ready

Staff and faculty members got a memo from the safety office yesterday announcing a "mandatory" online course in Workplace Violence and Harassment Awareness — something that helps meet a requirement imposed by Ontario law.

"In June 2010," says the memo from the safety office's Kate Windsor, "a notice went out to the UW employee community announcing and describing our Workplace Violence Prevention Program." Also during the summer, new versions of Policy 33 (Ethical Behaviour) and Policy 34 (Health, Safety and Environment) were issued, to include language about harassment and violence.

Says the relevant section of Policy 34: "The university is committed to maintaining a workplace that is violence free. Any act of workplace violence is unacceptable conduct that will not be tolerated. The university strives to minimize the risk of violence, and to ensure that reasonable safeguards are in place to protect members of its community from incidents of violence in the workplace. This section applies to activities that occur while on university premises and to work-related activities or social events occurring off-campus.

"All members of the campus community have a responsibility in maintaining a violence free working and learning environment by not engaging in acts of violence and are encouraged to report incidents promptly as outlined in the university’s Workplace Violence Program. Anyone engaging in activities or behaviour found to be of a violent or threatening nature will be subject to disciplinary and other sanctions (up to and including termination of employment, expulsion and ban from university premises). Criminal or civil proceedings may also be initiated."

The impetus for this new attention to preventing violence on the job is changes to the Ontario Health and Safety Act that became effective in June. They aim to "strengthen protections for workers from workplace violence and address workplace harassment", and they apply to all provincially regulated workplaces, which includes universities.

This week's memo takes the next step: "As part of legislative requirements and the program outlined by the University, a Workplace Violence & Harassment Awareness training program has been developed to educate employees about workplace violence and harassment and related UW policies, procedures and resources. The Safety Office and UW Police are pleased to announce that an online training module is now available for registration to all employees with a UW UserID.

"Workplace Violence and Harassment Awareness training is mandatory on the part of all staff, faculty and graduate students. Management is responsible for confirming that all employees complete the training in a timely manner."

A course for supervisors, being offered face to face in late October, was announced in a separate memo to department heads last week.

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Blackouts, Internet outages and dead cells

“More redundancy” would help with the reliability of electricity supply to the main campus, and work is being done in the hope of making that possible, says Rick Zalagenas, director of utilities and maintenance.

The Waterloo campus is now connected to Waterloo North Hydro, and thus to the Ontario power grid, “both from the east and from the west”, Zalagenas said yesterday when I asked him to explain how the hydro is supplied and why there have been some power flickers lately.

The feed from the east comes from the Scheifele power station near Conestoga Mall, he said. From the west, a line brings power either from the Eby Rush substation on Fischer-Hallman Road or from “Station 3” right on the north campus north of Columbia Street. Zalagenas said he’s been working with consultants about the possibility of hooking up to other power sources as Waterloo North Hydro, the municipally owned utility in this area, continues to develop them.

In general, he said, power flickers tend to be most common in the autumn, and are usually blamed on birds and rodents touching power lines and causing a momentary short circuit. The most recent flicker on the main campus made lights and computers blink on Saturday morning. A longer power outage took everything out of commission for a few minutes early last Wednesday afternoon.

Information systems and technology has concluded that the local power outage wasn’t related to Internet trouble that also hit the campus last Wednesday. Bruce Campbell, manager of network services, says an outage in Toronto was actually to blame: “UW's primary internet service provider, Cogent, was down from 11:45 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., due to a power failure in Toronto. During this time, our traffic was routed over our secondary service. However, that service became saturated, and service degraded. Users would have noticed slow web browsing to off campus sites.  

“Also during that time, users may have noticed they could not reach Google services at all. That was caused by a failure at our research internet service provider, Orion. The Cogent outage resulted in several Orion gigabit ethernet circuits saturating, and a known bug in Orion's infrastructure caused several circuits to freeze completely, requiring manual intervention to correct. ORION reports that they are upgrading equipment over the next six months.”

I asked Campbell about still another issue, some complaints that cell phone service has been unreliable on campus in the last few days. “I don't know what those cell complaints are about, or if there is an actual service outage/ degradation,” he said. “It would not be related to our wifi infrastructure. The wifi uses 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Cell phones use 800 and 1900MHz bands (or thereabouts). In the basement of Math and Computer, we have a Spotwave cell booster installed, but otherwise we're not involved in cell service on campus.”

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Sports ethics, Homecoming, and iPads

Olympic skier Beckie Scott is on campus today to give the Friends of the Library lecture (4:00 in the Humanities Theatre) — and, first, to take part in a workshop on “Ethics in Sports” organized by the philosophy department. It’ll run from 10:00 to noon in Humanities room 373. Says the phil department: “The University of Waterloo’s recent courageous decision to suspend its football program in light of positive tests for Performance Enhancing Drugs has once again put the issue of PEDs in the public eye. Join Olympic Gold medalist and advocate for drug-free sport Beckie Scott and Assistant Professor of Philosophy Mathieu Doucet in a discussion of some of the ethical and philosophical issues surrounding the use of PEDs in sports.” The afternoon lecture has the title “Visions of Excellence: How the Strength of a Dream and the Power of a Team Took on the World”, and admission is free. As with each year’s Friends lecture, it will be accompanied by a display of books and other creations by people from across the university. This year, says Mary Stanley of the library office, there are “the creative works of 39 individuals associated with Waterloo, either faculty, staff, or alumni. The link to the authors and others participating is now live.”

Homecoming 2010 happens this weekend — a couple of preliminary events on Friday (a "tailgate party" at noon hour in the Research and Technology Park, for one) but mostly on Saturday, with everything from alumni reunions to the traditional applied health sciences fun-run around the ring road. "Bring any kids, or kids-at-heart, to meet Curious George at the family carnival," writes Chantel Franklin of the alumni affairs office, one of the key people in getting it all organized. "Then head to the north campus to cheer on our men's and women's rugby teams." Two cultural events that began as separate fixtures on the Waterloo calendar and have now become parts of Homecoming are scheduled for Saturday as well: the East Asian Festival at Renison University College, and the Pow Wow at St. Paul's UC. Full information is, of course, available on the web, and will be outlined in the Daily Bulletin as the weekend nears.

Earlier this year, as the old Graphics department was dissolved, the copy centres across campus became part of Retail Services. The result is some innovations, says a memo from RS director May Yan. Here's part of what she has to say: "We are introducing iPad rentals in the Campus Copy Centre at Dana Porter Library. Rental by the day or for the week is available. iClickers, publisher Access Codes for courses, and phone cards are some of the new products available for sale at this location. Our goal is to products/services that will help students to succeed at Waterloo. New products and services will be introduced in MC, DC and CEIT copy centres over the next few months."

CAR

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