For researchers, the pipes, the pipes are calling

by Alice Seviora.

University of Waterloo researchers have received a grant from the US Water Research Foundation and are collaborating with international experts to study old and failing municipal water supply pipes.

Scenes of cars frozen in ice up to their wheel wells and houses flooded from broken water mains have been commonplace in the news recently, as the cold winter weather has put excessive stress on many cities' aged, corroded and otherwise deteriorated water pipes.

The Water Research Foundation Grant was awarded to the research team led by Professor Mark Knight in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Professor Rizwan Younis, Research Associate with the Centre for Advancement of Trenchless Technologies (CATT) also located at the University of Waterloo. They will be working with a group of international experts to develop the first standardized, systematic method to evaluate and classify the condition state of North America’s water mains.

The existing buried pipes that supply drinking water to hundreds of millions of households in North America have lost their structural and operational resiliency due to various defects resulting from aging and other factors. This industry-based project will develop a standard system to identify and evaluate various types of defects using non-destructive techniques. A standard condition rating system, based on severity and extent of identified defects, will also be developed for drinking water pipes.

Every year municipalities spend millions of dollars to fix water pipe breaks. For example, the City of Toronto experiences an average of 1,400 water pipe breaks annually due to mechanical or structural failure of the underground pipes. The cost to fix these breaks can vary from $6,000 to over $12,000 each. Thus, in Toronto approximately $10 million dollars is spent annually just to fix broken water mains.

Toronto is not alone. This winter the City of Kenora, Ontario, has had so many water main breaks that its Mayor had to issue a boil water advisory.

"We have so many breaks all over so what's happened is when they try and isolate lines and restart them, they are busting other lines all over the place." said Mayor Dave Canfield recently. "It's a situation we've never seen before. This is by far the worst, so the boil water advisory is a precautionary process so we can try and get these mains back up."

The goal of this project is to develop an industry-wide standard that will allow North American cities to speak the same language and to determine which pipes need to be fixed now or in the immediate future. It will also lay the foundation for North America’s water utilities to determine the real cost of water infrastructure backlog and deficit – the money required to bring water infrastructure to acceptable standard.

The work will be completed in collaboration with John Matthews, Principal Research Scientist at Battelle, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Yehuda Kleiner, Principal, Yeda Consultants Ltd.

 

Back to top

What makes a teacher a really great teacher?

by Farrah Chow.

Everyone from parents to politicians have an opinion about improving education. But when it comes to great teachers, it seems students are the experts.

This year, Waterloo’s Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE) asked local students: What makes a teacher a really GREAT teacher? The question is part of the centre’s annual Loving to Learn Day, an initiative that started in 2006 and has spread to other universities across Canada and as far as Australia.

About 200 students answered the question and Mark Morton, Loving to Learn Day organizer, said: “While students certainly know what they like from an instructor, do they always know what they need? The answer, I think, is that most of them do.”

All of the submissions from students, including the winners, can be found on the Centre for Teaching Excellence website. Morton’s analysis of the student responses can be found on the centre's blog.

Top five responses

So, what do students need from their teachers? The top 5 responses were a teacher who is:

• understanding, caring, and relatable
  
• supportive and positive academically and personally
  
• respects and encourages individual differences
  
• challenges students but knows their limits
  
• makes learning interesting and fun
  

The responses were clear that a great teacher is more than one who uses lectures, textbooks, and technology.

First-place winner

“When we look back on our years of schooling, it will be the teachers who actually cared about us, the ones who inspired us and made us love the subject, whom we will remember as being extraordinary teachers,” says Katie Hobbs, a Kitchener high school student whose entry won first place.

A younger student wrote: “It’s easy for teachers to make students sit in rows, and give identical worksheets to students but a great teacher can inspire learning and inspire creativity,” wrote Nancy Huang, a Waterloo elementary school student.

“Anyone can stand and lecture, and many can perform a good lecture,” wrote Bailey Jacobs, a University of Waterloo student. “But in the presence of a great educator, the students will feel like they are there for a reason and are being held accountable for their success in the class.”

 

Back to top

Remembering Scott Vanstone

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Scott Vanstone, a former professor in combinatorics & optimization and co-founder of Certicom, died Sunday, March 2.

Vanstone spent 35 years as a professor of mathematics at St. Jerome's University and in Waterloo's department of combinatorics and optimization. His research in cryptography was the cornerstone of the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research, founded in 1998. When the centre launched, Vanstone was named to an Industrial Research Chair co-sponsored by NSERC and Pitney-Bowes.

Vanstone was a solid branch in Waterloo's cryptography family tree, completing his PhD at the University under the supervision of Ron Mullin, who was himself taught by cryptography pioneer Bill Tutte.

Vanstone was a major figure in the development of cryptographic techniques used in everything from military intelligence to online banking. He authored or co-authored over 125 patents and has published more than 150 research papers and a number of books including The Handbook of Applied Cryptography and A Guide to Elliptic Curve Cryptography.

Vanstone was also co-founder of Certicom, which was spun off from the University in 1985. The University's research on public-key data encryption led to the creation of the Data Encryption Group (DEG) in 1983, which included Vanstone, Ron Mullin and Gordon Agnew. The DEG would later become the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research.

The trio founded Certicom to commercialize the DEG's breakthroughs. Certicom’s technology was built around elliptic curve cryptography or ECC, after Vanstone and his partners recognized the potential application of the theory.

"I had studied it enough to believe in it," Vanstone told Silicon Valley North in 2003. "It was the rest of the world that didn't believe in it."

Certicom's ECC cryptography algorithms, rooted in algebraic geometry, were in the right place at the right time as wireless and Internet communication began to take off. ECC can be found in BlackBerries, RFID tags, digital signatures, and satellite radios, and the company's clients included the US National Security Agency (NSA).

First called Cryptech, then Mobius Encryption, Certicom changed its name for a third and final time in 1995 and was bought by BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion), one of its earliest customers, in 2009. After the sale of Certicom to BlackBerry, Vanstone served as Vice-President Cryptographic Research, Advanced Technology until July 2012.

Vanstone was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and recipient of an Ontario Premier's Catalyst Award for Lifetime Achievement in Innovation. Retiring from Waterloo in 2009, he was named Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 2010. In 2011 he was named a Fellow of the International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR).

The family will receive visitors at the J. Scott Early Funeral Home in Milton from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 8.

Photograph by Hilary Camilleri, One For the Wall Photography.

 

Back to top

Waterloo shines at Dining in the Dark

by Lauren Ward.

The last day of February was a day of charitable deeds for many associated with the University of Waterloo.  On the evening of Friday, February 28, members of the university community took part in the DeafBlind Ontario Services fundraising event Dining in the Dark, which saw its second annual run at Kitchener's Westmount Golf & Country Club.

Most of the night’s entertainment came from Waterloo students, including an a cappella performance by the Intentional Accidentals, guitar duo Kyle Pinnell (Arts and Business) and Jason Yin (Computer Science), and violinist Robert Gooding-Townsend (Knowledge Integration).  Each act volunteered their time to perform amazingly and helped to provide an enjoyable experience for the guests.

In addition, volunteers and coordinators of the event have associations with Waterloo, including volunteer Lauren Ward (Scheduling Specialist in the Registrar’s Office) and Shari Biggar Chantler, Manager of Regional Operations (UWaterloo alumni – graduate of St. Jerome’s University). 

Dining in the Dark is an annual event held to raise funds for the DeafBlind Ontario Services.  The event was headed by Juliette Coughlan, Coordinator of Development, Susan Manahan, manager of Community Development, and Nicole Champagne, Assistant of communication and Quality Assurance. 

DeafBlind in an organization that is set up to support individuals who are deafblind to live and thrive within the community they reside.  They assist in increasing clients’ independence on their own terms with intervenors, residence and other specialized services.  There are residential locations and community services across the province, including the Kitchener-Waterloo area. 

 

Back to top

Mini Town Hall today and other notes

The first in a series of Mini Town Halls is set for this afternoon at the Velocity residence great hall in the Minota Hagey Residence. Today's town hall, which deals with the theme of entrepreneurship, will run from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. and feature remarks by President Feridun Hamdullahpur, theme lead Howard Armitage and other members of the entrepreneurship working group.

The town halls are being organized to give members of the university community an opportunity to learn how the Strategic Plan is being put into action as the theme leaders and members of the theme working groups present their progress and take questions.

As with the Fall and Spring town hall meetings, questions can be submitted in advance to townhall@uwaterloo.ca, and the conversation can be joined using the #UWth hashtag and by following @uWaterlooLIVE. The event will be webcast. Seating is limited.

The UW Political Science Students Association (PSSA)'s Ukraine discussion panel takes place today at 4:00 p.m. in EV1 350. Panellists include John Jaworsky of political science, Tetyana Reichert of Germanic & Slavic Studies, and the history department's Alexander Statiev.

Deep breath: The air shutdown in the Physics building originally scheduled for this morning has been postponed to next Thursday, March 13 from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. The outage is also being extended to Biology 1. Power to the air supply for the entire third floor of Physics as well as power in Biology 1 rooms 001, 369, penthouse and elevator will be shut down, affecting fumehood exhaust, heating, ventilation, and A/C as renovations are carried out.

Here's the latest Nutrition Month "myth vs. fact" provided by Health Services dietician Sandra Ace:

Myth:  Juice has too much sugar and isn’t good for you.

Fact:  Eating vegetables and fruit provides more fibre and fewer calories than juice. For example, a cup of grapes contains two-thirds of the calories and three times more fibre than a cup of unsweetened grape juice. If you drink juice, look for 100% fruit juice over fruit flavoured drinks, punches or cocktails and limit this to no more than one or two daily servings (a total of  ½  cup/125 ml to 1 cup/250 ml). Drinking juice, even if it’s unsweetened, can affect a toddler or small child’s appetite, so limit their intake to about ½ cup/125 ml per day.  Most vegetable juices, while low in calories, contain a lot of added sodium (salt); look for lower sodium varieties. If you like fresh juice like apple cider, choose pasteurized, which is treated to kill potentially harmful bacteria. And while grapefruit juice is low in calories and a good source of vitamin C, it interferes with some medications. Check with your health care provider or a pharmacist.

 

Back to top