The Warriors Band will be holding its 45th reunion this weekend in conjunction with the Naismith Classic basketball tournament. Past and current band members will join forces to cheer on the Warriors, especially at the men’s basketball game against UBC on Saturday night in the PAC. “Formed in 1966,” math student Nancy Soontiens notes, “the Warriors Band has been known to perform at football, basketball, volleyball and hockey, as well as the occasional opening ceremony, campus open house and city parade. Originally formed as a way for band members to receive free admittance into varsity games, the Warriors Band has grown to be a fun and quirky way for students to get involved. The band is happy to accept new members. The only requirements are a sense of humour and willingness to have fun. Practices are Thursdays from 5:30 to 6:30 in PAC room 1001.”

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More 'usable' home page coming this fall

A new design for the university’s web home page will be launched shortly, replacing the “big picture” design that has been in place since last winter. Plans for the facelift were announced at the end of last week in a memo to communicators in departments across campus, and on the web.uwaterloo.ca site for web creators.

“We have a new homepage design coming this fall that will be launched in the web content management system (WCMS),” said the memo, which came from Eva Grabinski, the lead on the web redesign project in information systems and technology. “With this,” she added, “we also have an updated design for faculty, department, school and support-unit websites — this design will also launch this fall in the WCMS.”

She said she and her colleagues have “started implementing the design for faculty, department, school and support-unit websites. Please keep visiting this pilot site to see the progress on the site up to official launch.”

Between October and December, she said, web users will see the new look on the university home page (“and some related web pages”), the faculty-level site for the faculties of environment and applied health sciences, the housing and residences site, and a site providing resources for web creators.

“In January 2012,” she said, “we will start rolling out the WCMS to other university websites; we have started to address the migration order of websites, and will be sharing information about this in the near future.”

A “conceptual design” of the new home page, visible on the web.uwaterloo.ca site, shows news and event information front and centre, and the audience-related links, including current students, faculty and staff, prominent at one side. That’s quite a change from the current home page, Grabinski’s memo notes. It gives some reasons for the change:

• “More than 1,600 responses from future students, current students, faculty, staff and others. Visual appearance ratings ranged from positive to negative. However, usability of the site was rated poor by the majority of respondents; people expect to find content about the university and useful links on the home page.”

• “Usability challenges with the current design. The slide-down panels integral to providing key information do not work well on mobile devices. Given the rapid increase in smartphone and other mobile device use, we needed to address this issue.”

• “The university team reviewed research from the past three years about our audiences and their information needs. The new design aligns more closely with the research data and puts this information up front right on the homepage.”

In addition, says Grabinski, “the university is reviewing its strategic objectives.The new homepage design will be responsive to the university’s priorities.”

A link for feedback — anonymous, if the user prefers — will be available when the new design officially launches, she added.

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That's my truck! Psychologists observe kids

by Carling Mashinter, department of psychology

Just what do toddlers understand when they claim an object as their own?

Who hasn’t heard a toddler screaming “Mine!” as she rushes across the room to retrieve a favoured toy from another child’s grasp? Often that shout only means “I want it and I want it now!” but it could also convey some understanding of ownership. Children’s understanding of ownership is a topic of research that is just beginning to gain momentum among developmental psychologists, and researchers at the University of Waterloo are at the forefront.

Ownership is of broad importance in children’s lives. It is involved in countless activities including sharing, borrowing, buying, trading, and stealing. Furthermore, ownership is an abstract characteristic of an object. Unlike colour or size or the sounds a toy makes, ownership is invisible and abstract. Ownership must be inferred. How children draw inferences about ownership is an exciting and new area of research.

Hildy Ross and Ori Friedman, of Waterloo’s psychology department, have recently published a collection of articles on children’s ownership (Origins of Ownership and Property, published by Jossey-Bass, 2011). This volume explores topics such as how ownership is related to the development of morality, how preschoolers make reliable inferences about who owns what, and how school-aged children reason about property transfers.

Interest at Waterloo, however, extends to the first and second year of life, where toddlers are learning about the basics of property and property rights. In a series of studies dating back to the 1990’s, Ross and her colleagues have shown that ownership affects how toddlers play together. Both with siblings and with friends, children as young as 20 months are more likely to claim property (“mine” or “my puppy”) when objects actually belong to them, than when they belong to someone else.

In a brief laboratory study, pairs of 24-month-old friends were each given a toy by their mothers. (Actually, Ross said, the toys are gifts from the lab, to thank the children for taking part in their study.) Later these toys were placed in the middle of the room for both children to play with. The results showed that children were able to retain possession of their own toys and more often interfered and tried to regain the toys if another child was playing with them. Ross points out that “from quite an early age children seem to understand what philosophers have identified as the fundamental right of ownership — that owners are entitled to either allow or exclude others from having or using property that belongs to them.”

What is even more interesting, and the current focus of research at Ross’s Family Studies lab (left), is the question of whether children understand that others also have rights over their property — that my friend or my sister can decide whether or not I get to play with her belongings. There was some preliminary evidence in the earlier work that toddlers appropriately attribute ownership of a friend’s toy to that friend (“Jimmy’s frog”) and that they are more likely to give the toy to their friend if the toy actually belonged to the friend; however, much work remains to be done to learn about how children understand others’ rights.

Aimee Field, a current graduate student at Waterloo, is continuing the work with toddlers as part of her master’s project. She is seeking volunteers with children who are close to 24 or 30 months old, who have a friend or acquaintance (or neighbour or cousin or sibling) of roughly the same age, who would be interested in participating in this research. There’s more information online, or phone ext. 32094.

CAR

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