December 19, 2005

Monday, December 19, 2005

Robotics competition returns to UW
'Paying for your children's education'
Notes in the bleak midwinter

Editor:
Chris Redmond
credmond@uwaterloo.ca

[Coloured lights outline skeleton]
Saurians aglow: "The dinosaurs are in the mood for Christmas!" writes Peter Russell from UW's earth sciences museum in the Centre for Environmental and Information Technology.

Robotics competition returns to UW -- from the UW media relations office

Some of Ontario's brightest high school students will once again converge on the University of Waterloo campus for the FIRST Robotics Waterloo Regional Competition next spring. The annual event involves almost 30,000 high school students around the world. The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics regional competition at Waterloo will take place March 23-25.

The contest involves short games played by remote-controlled robots which are designed and built within six weeks out of a common set of basic parts by a team of 15 to 25 students and a handful of engineer-mentors. The students pilot the robots on the field.

"There will be between 25 to 30 teams participating in the Waterloo regional competition involving a total of 700 students," said electrical and computer engineering professor Rob Gorbet, who helped bring the regionals to the campus last year. "UW is one of two Canadian venues to be given an opportunity to hold a FIRST regional competition," he said, noting that the other Canadian site is located at the Hershey Centre in Mississauga.

The annual competition now reaches more than 28,000 students on 1,100 teams in 33 regional competitions. The final championship will be held in Atlanta April 27-29. The teams come from Canada, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Great Britain, Israel and almost every U.S. state.

The event is called "an exciting, multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way." The regional competitions are high-tech spectator sporting events, the result of focused brainstorming, real-world teamwork, dedicated mentoring, project timelines and deadlines.

Regional competitions are often held at universities and involve teams cheered by thousands of fans over two and a half days. Referees oversee the competition and judges present awards to teams for design, technology, sportsmanship and commitment.

Universities, colleges, corporations, businesses and individuals provide scholarships to the student participants. Involved engineers experience again many of the reasons they chose engineering as a profession and their companies contribute to the community while creating their future workforces. The competition shows students that technological fields hold many opportunities and the basic concepts of science, math, engineering and invention are exciting and interesting.

Mark Breadner, a teacher at Woburn Collegiate Institute in Toronto, helped prepare the first Canadian team for the 2001 championship at Disney World. He felt that Canada should have its own regional event, in addition to the 16 regionals south of the border. In 2002, as a result of his efforts, there were 22 teams and the first Canadian regional was held at Hershey. Two years ago, Breadner approached Gorbet at UW to discuss the possibility of the university becoming a second Canadian regional location. The idea received strong support and FIRST organizers named Waterloo an expansion site.

Sponsors for FIRST Robotics this spring will be Research In Motion, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and UW itself.

'Paying for your children's education' -- by Bob Kerton, dean of arts, from the arts faculty's alumni newsletter

A million dollars. That's what one analyst says is the lifetime difference, on average, between a high school graduate and a college or university graduate (Globe and Mail, August 19, 2005). I am sure you'd like to have your million up front. It's an average based on a forty-year career, and the average may be a lot less interesting than your actual situation.

Question: Which age group of alumni got lucky with tuition? Answer: If you went to university in the 1980s, you paid the lowest tuition rates of any age cohort -- and you got to pay less than 15 percent of the total costs of your education. From 1994-95 to 2003-04, average tuition for Arts and Science in Ontario increased from $2,225 to $4,161. The sharp increase in tuition after you graduated is an inevitable response to the fact that by 2003, Ontario had fallen to last place among the 60 North American jurisdictions in the amount of public support per student.

How can you plan for your own children? According to Statistics Canada, the average cost of one year of university is now between $12,000 and $15,000. Plus, the probability that a Canadian child will attend university is nearly doubled if a parent attended university, so you may need to plan ahead. The most economic strategy for you to take is a savings/investment plan with high returns, no fees and no restrictions on withdrawals. That's an impossible dream for most people.

Many parents are willing to choose a savings plan that restricts payouts to education -- a psychological "commitment mechanism" that comes at a cost. For example, the Registered Educational Savings Plan gained new life after 1998 when Ottawa added a bonus -- 20 percent (up to $400/year) to the RESP if the student actually enrols in higher education. These RESPs are selling briskly and are very profitable to most sellers. At a Financial Symposium (June 2005), Statistics Canada reported that about 65 percent of middle income Canadians who save for education use RESPs.

Unhappily, these are buccaneer days for sellers of RESPs. A recent review of selling practices conducted by the Ontario Securities Commission uncovered an alarming volume of malpractices -- among them concealed fees, excessive claims about returns, statements that a plan is a "not for profit," unsupervised sellers, outrageous limits to liability for seller misrepresentation, and a host of other abuses, many of which the salespeople do not even understand. In an illuminating piece in Toronto Star papers, Ellen Roseman shows specific cases of disappointment and offers advice to "shop carefully." Unhappily, it's close to impossible for the potential buyer to identify which seller has the best offer. It's too late when you cash in the RESP to learn about restrictions. Real progress will come only when we have public policies to reduce the "noise" in the RESP market so that the best sellers rise to the top.

My own preference, as a general approach, would be a low interest loan, repayable after graduation. It is true that some students are ill prepared for the borrowing decision and can make unwise loans (especially with credit cards at 18 percent or higher), but that is another issue. Note: Graduates from the University of Waterloo have the lowest loan default rates among graduates of any university in Ontario.

The financing policy we are likely to see in the next couple of years is the "income contingent loan" now in use in several countries. With the ICL, graduates who succeed financially, pay more, and repay more quickly than graduates with lower incomes. My reservation about the ICL rests in the pretense that this is new. After all, our income tax system already looks after much of the income contingent payment plan. The 16 percent of the population with higher education provides 33 percent of personal tax revenues. I'll bet you already noticed.

Advance financial planning is prudent. So are loans -- especially if the recent "million-dollar lifetime premium" is anywhere near correct. It's an investment in your children. And it's high time we got Truth in RESP rules to allow families to get reliable information on where to find quality RESPs.

Notes in the bleak midwinter

Frank Seglenieks, manager of the UW weather station and a graduate student in civil engineering, will be appearing on the Rogers Cable television program "Daytime" (on channel 20) tomorrow "to talk about what happened this year with regards to the weather." The program airs live at 11 a.m. and then is repeated several times during the day. Seglenieks also wrote to clarify something I said on Friday: that the weather station's precipitation gauge can't really distinguish snow from rain, meaning that the figures it reports this time of year are questionable. He gently referred me to the station's FAQ, which says in part: "In the winter the precipitation is measured in mm. This number is referred to as the Snow Water Equivalent. This is the number of mm of water that would result if the amount of snow that fell were melted into liquid water. As we don't have a human observer at the station we can't make direct judgements on the weather conditions (snow, fog, cloudy), so we can only infer what is happening from the other measurements. Snow can fall when the temperature is as high as 4 degrees and rain can fall down to about minus-2 degrees, so you can't just look at the temperature to determine if it is snow or rain that is falling. A common rule is to assume that there would be 10 times the amount of snow as snow water equivalent. For example, if 1 mm of snow water equivalent falls it would be approximately equivalent to 10 mm (or 1 cm) of snowfall. This 10 to 1 radio is just an approximation and depends on the type of snow that is falling and your location." So Friday morning's reading of 7 mm of precipitation equals around 7 centimetres of snow, which sounds about right.

I also have to report that I erred on Thursday when I wrote that the fall term was "the first time architecture has been part" of the Waterloo Engineering Endowment Fund's grant allocations. Graeme Baer of systems design engineering, a keen Daily Bulletin reader, wrote to remind me that in fact WEEF gave a $12,000 grant for improvements to architecture teaching facilities in the spring term -- the first term in which the architecture school was part of the faculty of engineering. The innovation was report in the Iron Warrior in late July.

The Centre for International Governance Innovation, an independent agency in Waterloo but with close ties to UW, announced on Friday that a major international figure is coming to join its staff. She is Louise Fréchette, the Canadian-born deputy secretary-general of the United Nations. Fréchette (a former federal deputy minister, and recipient of an honorary degree from UW in June 2004) will arrive in April as a "Distinguished Fellow" at CIGI. "Mme. Fréchette," said CIGI's news release, "will also be associated with the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University."

The Warrior football program is holding a news conference at noon today in its dressing rooms at the Columbia Icefield, to announce "fourteen of the top high school prospects in Canada" who will join the team this fall. . . . The list of short courses in computing to be offered by information systems and technology during January is now available online. . . . Today's the last day of fall term operation for REVelation cafeteria in Ron Eydt Village, so any remaining Eydtvillagers will have to trek over to Mudie's in Village I for meals for the rest of this week. . . .

CAR

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