Daily Bulletin

University of Waterloo -- Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

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Monday, February 19, 1996

When the lights went out

UW had a four-hour blackout late on Friday, the second hydro outage in a week for the campus. This time the cause was a road accident on Columbia Street at about 3 p.m. A car leaving campus by the Village access road hit another car coming along Columbia, which then smashed into a hydro pole. A transformer blew up and there was a brief blackout, followed by a longer one as Waterloo North Hydro repaired the damage. Waterloo Regional Police say there were no injuries, but a number of householders have reported appliances damaged by a power surge.

Horst Beyerle of plant operations calls the afternoon "quite some excitement", and quite different from last Monday's hour-long outage. This time there was advance warning of the long shutdown, and frantic phone calls were made across campus advising people to shut down equipment and get ready. Eventually the campus went black at 4:25, and power was restored around 8:30. Among special measures that had to be taken: extra propane heaters brought into the biology greenhouses to keep plants from freezing. Beyerle says several of his staff, as well as people from the central plant and mechanical section of plant ops, were working overtime until about 11:00 to deal with the aftermath. One electrician, Ken Golem, was called back to work at 3 a.m. to deal with equipment that wasn't restarting properly.

Programming team is third

A Waterloo team finished third at the World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in Philadelphia on Saturday. First place went to the University of California at Berkeley and second place to Harvard University.

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is the most prestigious programming contest for university teams, with over $35,000 in prize money. More than 1,000 university teams competed world-wide in 18 regional contests, and the top finishers of those regional contests, including UW, advanced to the Finals, in which 43 teams competed for top honours.

Berkeley, Harvard and Waterloo all solved the six problems in the contest -- Berkeley in 712 total minutes, Harvard in 796 and Waterloo in 866. The University of Sofia, Bulgaria, came next with 896 minutes for the six problems. Besides UW, Canadian teams in the finals were from Simon Fraser University (finishing eighth), the University of Toronto and the University of Saskatchewan.

The UW team consisted of Philip Chong, Michael van Biesbrouck, and Ka-Ping Yee. Each of the team members won a US $1,500 scholarship. The team's strong showing "was even more remarkable", says coach Jo Ebergen, "considering the last-minute replacement of one of the original team members, Chris Hendrie, by Philip Chong. Chris suffered a collapsed lung shortly before the team was supposed to leave."

Stream changes are proposed

The engineering faculty council is to meet this afternoon (3:30 p.m. in Carl Pollock Hall room 3385), and the agenda includes proposals for "single streaming" in the co-op programs of the civil and chemical engineering departments. The changes are intended to help departments cope with a reduced number of professors, by requiring fewer courses to be taught in two different terms each year.

The civil engineering department seeks to operate the civil program only in the "8 stream" in future -- all first-year students taking eight months on campus before their first work term -- while the department's other programs, environmental and geological engineering, will be in the "4 stream". But the chemical engineering department is proposing to run its environmental engineering program on the "8 stream", while students in pure chemical engineering would be in the "4 stream".

The changes would simplify things within the individual departments (civil, for example, expects to cut down from 102 "teaching tasks" per year to 89) but would have the effect of creating two environmental engineering programs running on opposite schedules. Lively discussion can be expected.

Senate meets this evening

The UW senate will meet at 7:30 p.m. in Needles Hall room 3001. On the discussion, besides routine business, is an item headed "Challenges":

The Provost will lead a discussion on financial, organization and academic challenges now facing the University including:

strategies for dealing with budget reductions and reduced faculty and staff complements
priorities for replacement appointments and reinvestment
opportunities for inter-departmental and inter-institutional co-operation
possible changes in administrative structure
public relations strategies

On the day the doubloon arrives

Statements from faculty and graduate student candidates to senate will be appearing in the Gazette this week, and can already be seen on the Web (look through UWinfo under Departments, then Secretariat).

Hot water will be shut down tomorrow morning in the University Club. The reason, as stated in a utility shutdown memo from the plant operations department, is short and to the point; "There is a leak in the Boiler."

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

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