University of Waterloo

Daily Bulletin

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Monday, November 13, 1995

Who's the best university?

Waterloo is "best overall" in Canada, according to the annual rankings of universities published by Maclean's magazine. The fifth annual universities issue of the national newsmagazine is on sale this morning.

Further evidence of Waterloo's reputation: this university is also listed as "highest quality", "most innovative", "leaders of tomorrow", and "best overall" in its category of "comprehensive" universities. Maclean's divides universities into "primarily undergraduate", "comprehensive", and "medical-doctoral".

But the magazine's own rankings put UW lower than the "reputational" survey would suggest: Waterloo appears third this year, behind Victoria and Simon Fraser. Among the factors considered in the rankings: Waterloo ranks first in the average entering grade of students, ninth (out of nine) in average class size, fifth in library holdings per student.

The magazine ranked Mount Allison University top in the "primarily undergraduate" category, and Toronto top in the "medical-doctoral" category (followed by Queen's, McGill and British Columbia).

Waterloo triumphs in programming

As it did last year, UW has swept first and second place in the East Central regional competition of the ACM Programming Contest. Jo Ebergen of the computer science department, who coached UW's teams, sends a report on Saturday's event:

Team A and B were engaged in a neck-and-neck race the whole contest, with team B finally winning with a total of 720 points. Team A was second with 742 points (which means the difference was a mere 22 minutes). Both teams solved all 7 problems in just over 3 hours. Third was the University of Toronto, the only other team that solved all problems within the maximum time of 5 hours, with a total of 1036 points. Fourth was Carnegie Mellon University.
After this convincing UW victory, the winning team is very motivated to try to get a top-six place in the World Finals to be held next February in Philadelphia. The UW teams were partly sponsored by Watcom. UW team B consisted of Michael van Biesbrouck, Chris Hendrie, and Ka-Ping Yee. UW team A consisted of Nikita Borisov, Philip Chong, and Gabriel Chow. In total there were 70 teams from Ontario, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, and Indiana. There were 10 Canadian teams.

Hatred on the Internet

That's the topic of tonight's Rabbi Rosenzweig Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Jewish Students Association and B'nai Brith. The speaker is Ken McVay, a leader in countering antisemitic and "Holocaust denial" material on the Internet.

Among the goals of McVay's "Nizkor Project":

To team-write collaboratively (by a worldwide association of volunteer experts [historians, war-crimes prosecutors, lawyers, witnesses, etc.]) and to distribute research papers that expose the techniques used on the Internet by racists and antidemocratic propagandists.

His talk will begin at 7:00 tonight in Biology I room 271.

Results from the Naismith

I don't have all the scores yet, but it was an exciting weekend at the Naismith basketball tournament. UW demolished Queen's on Friday night and Ottawa on Saturday, then lost to Western on Sunday afternoon.

Guess who's on the Web!

Sometimes it seems as though everybody is, and the indexes, including UW's Electronic Library, have a hard time keeping up. Here are a few haphazardly selected URL's that might be useful or interesting:

John English, Kitchener's member of Parliament, at http://tdg.res.uoguelph.ca:80/~jenglish/
The UW-based Canadian Industrial Innovation Centre, at http://www.bizserve.com/canadian-detroit/caninvctr.html
The University Health Insurance Plan for foreign students, at http://www.uhip.mercer.ca/
The Toronto Blue Jays at http://www.bluejays.ca/bluejays
Transcripts of CBC's newscast "The National", at http://www.cbc.ca:80/sites/ptn/ptn.html

Also happening this Monday

"Female Circumcision: Some Case Histories" is a lecture by Laferne Clarke, social work faculty member at Wilfrid Laurier University; she'll speak at 7:30 p.m. in Arts Lecture room 113, sponsored by the women's studies program.
Islamic Awareness Week is under way, with an "Islamic Bazaar" today through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., in the Student Life Centre. Also today: "The Fundamentals of Islam, An Introduction to the Fastest Growing Religion in North America", at 7 p.m. in Davis Centre room 1304.

And the roads are slippery, as winter definitely seems to be coming early here in the great white north.

Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
credmond@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca

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