AIDS Awareness Week is under way

Daily Bulletin

Building will bear the Coutts name

Celebrations yesterday in the Davis Centre, and a dinner in South Campus Hall, marked the announcement of the gift, which comes in the form of shares in Teklogix International Inc. Coutts retired in September as chairman of Teklogix.

He was previously president and chief executive officer of the company, which produces wireless data communications systems for corporations with a mobile workforce and a need for real-time interactive data communications. Coutts graduated from Waterloo in 1964 with a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in the field that was then called just "electrical engineering".

"My family has had a lot of good fortune over the years," said Coutts, "and the University of Waterloo had a lot to do with that. This is my chance to give something back."

Sujeet Chaudhuri, dean of engineering, called yesterday "a notable day in the history of our university and our faculty". UW president David Johnston also spoke at the reception in Davis. Later, at dinner, thoughts turned to what Waterloo was like during Coutts's mud-and-dreams undergraduate years (left), and the speaker was Doug Wright, dean of engineering 1959-1966 and president of UW 1981-1993.

Coutts co-founded Teklogix in 1967 as a home-based enterprise with four other partners -- at first using computers in process control applications. Today, based in Mississauga, Teklogix is a global provider of real-time data collection and communications systems for industrial users. Its current president and chief executive officer is Ian McElroy, also a UW graduate.

In September, the company was bought by Psion PLC, Europe's largest maker of handheld computers, for $544 million. Earlier, in February, Coutts committed to donate 200,000 shares of Teklogix to UW, trading at about $35 per share, for a total gift of $7 million. The shares were transferred after the sale of the company was complete.

Johnston told his audience that he'd had to talk Coutts out of making the donation to UW anonymously. "It's important," he said, "that our students understand" that alumni who are in a position to do so can give something back to the university in later life.

According to yesterday's official announcement, the gift "will enhance the university's operations in three areas: Centre for Learning and Teaching Through Technology; student scholarships; and a major expansion of the Engineering Lecture Hall".

In EL, the money will help pay for construction that will add five classrooms and two lecture theatres on a new above-ground level. The project was approved earlier this year for partial financing from the Ontario government's SuperBuild program, but UW was left to raise the rest of the cost, which Coutts's gift will provide.

A fund of $500,000 will be established to support activities in the Centre for Learning and Teaching Through Technology (LT3), such as release time for professors to develop innovative applications of teaching technology within their academic specialties.

And there will be an endowment fund of $750,000 for scholarships to help students get international study and work experience. It will provide annual income to support four awards of $2,500 annually to encourage students to work in developing countries; seven awards of $2,000 each year for students who participate in international work or study experiences; and a total of $11,000 a year for international experience bursaries to support students with financial need who participate in international work or study.

Course studies women and technology -- from today's Gazette

Gender and Technology (WS 365A) represents "an important new field of scholarship: feminist studies of technology", according to the course description. Instructor Rhiannon Bury, a recent PhD graduate who previously taught the course at McMaster University, plans to examine a range of technologies over time and "the social relations that surround and define them".

Among the questions students will explore: What is the relationship between gender and technology? Why are computer and engineering field still dominated by men thirty years after the Women's Liberation Movement? Are technologies implicated in the oppression or alienation of women? Why does a long history of technological invention and use by women remain obscure?

Nick Cercone, chair of the CS department, says the course is a means of addressing a serious issue -- a drop in the number of women in undergraduate CS programs across North America over the past 10 years.

He's not sure why interest by women is falling when opportunities are present for both men and women in industry and in graduate studies. "I worry about the downturn, whatever the reason," he says, and in addition to encouraging women at the university level, is working with both academic and private partners to stimulate interest in CS among girls in elementary and secondary schools.

The idea of the Gender and Technology course developed through informal conversations between Cercone and women's studies director Vera Golini, and both hope the collaboration will raise awareness of the opportunities and address the hurdles women face in computer science.

Cercone expects interest in the course -- funded by the computer science department -- to be high. Students have the option of earning a CS or women's studies credit.

The course is one of more than a dozen offered by departments across campus this winter which, through their titles, make explicit their concern with women or gender, says Golini. That compares to a normal term when only four or five such courses would be available. "We've never had such an abundance of courses with women or gender in the title," she says.

Courses dealing with "gender" -- such as Gender, Environment and Development, Gender in War and Peace, and Gender Relations -- tend to address "the dynamics of both genders in a comparative/contrasting manner", says Golini. Those with "women" in the title -- Women and Film, Women in Classical Antiquity, or Women and Environments, for example -- do not exclude men, she says, "but identify that the concerns are more specifically and necessarily oriented toward the female gender."

Water (still) under the bridge

Says Kenyon: "Simon the Troll's unofficial history of the University of Waterloo makes a great gift for anyone interested in a lively, amusing, often irreverent history of this institution."

Simon is, as his web site makes clear, the troll who's been watching the changing scene since the campus was cornfield, and who tells all in his paperback history of UW, first published two years ago this week. The book is "by Simon the Troll as told to Chris Redmond" -- hey, that's me -- and is a lightly edited collection of a series that ran in the Gazette in 1997 and early 1998 to mark UW's 40th anniversary.

"The essentials are clear," says Simon in an early chapter. "Bulls gave way to bulldozers, and the next thing you know, the biggest product of the place is bull of a whole new kind." That's the sort of fellow a troll is -- cynical, but observant. Says James Downey, then president of UW, in the book's introduction: "Alternately shocked, amused, and touched by human endeavour, Simon serves up an appealing feast of fact, anecdote, vignette, character sketch, observation, and conclusion, all arranged with a fine sense of institutional character, and seasoned with a delicious wit."

Copies of Water Under the Bridge are available at the bookstore for $19.95.

Scribblings in the date-book

UW ombudsperson Marianne Miller will give a repeat today of last summer's noontime talk on "Renting to Students: What You Need to Know". The session is sponsored by the Employee Assistance Program, and will begin at 12 noon in Davis Centre room 1302.

Today's noon-hour concert in the Conrad Grebel College chapel presents Timothy Minthorn with "new music for solo piano", including "Four Preludes" and "Tidal Storm" of his own composition, as well as works by Srul Irving Glick and Colin Eatock. Kitchener-born and a UW music graduate, Minthorn is now based in Toronto as a composer, and is performing this season to promote his new CD, "Tidal Storm".

The volleyball Warriors, female branch, will host York University for a game in the PAC main gym at 6:00 tonight. The women's basketball Warriors are playing tonight at Windsor.

The annual general meeting of the Federation of Students will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the great hall of the Student Life Centre. A number of bylaw changes are on the agenda -- largely affecting the structure of the Council of Presidents, which connects the Federation with groups such as residence, college and faculty societies -- and there's the routine annual business about audited financial reports. It's also a delight to see one of my colleagues recognized: the Feds have a motion on the agenda to make Avvey Peters a "lifetime member" of the Federation. (A former key member of the Federation staff, Peters is now working here in information and public affairs.) All fee-paying undergraduate students are entitled to attend the annual meeting, speak and vote.

A special event tomorrow: "Oscar Wilde, an informal reading from his work to mark the one hundredth anniversary of his death", at 11:30 a.m. in Humanities room 378.

Not yet writing with the panache of Oscar Wilde? Not yet certified as "proficient" in the English tongue? The English Language Proficiency Exam will be offered on Wednesday, December 6, at 7 p.m. in the Physical Activities Complex, and all students who have not met their faculty's English requirement should plan to be there.

And in case anybody was wondering: the next payday for faculty and monthly-paid staff members will be Thursday, December 21, a day earlier than the formula would normally provide. After that it's a long, long stretch to the payday of Friday, January 26.

CAR

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@uwaterloo.ca | (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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