I have my doubts about a lot of these rankings of universities and programs, and later this autumn I’ll post something about them. But in the meantime, I won’t argue with this one 🙂
Hard to Read Lectures?
For years I’ve laboured to make my lecture materials as clear as possible and easy to read. I tend to use prepared overheads and/or Powerpoints, and not too much blackboard work since my handwriting is a bit messy (and writing a lot on a blackboard or whiteboard gets to be a bit hard on arthritic hands). However, now I find out I should be making my lecture materials harder to read! Why is that? Continue reading
Powering Up Relativistic Baseball
There’s a cute post on the consequences of a pitcher throwing a baseball at 90% of the speed of light (see Relativistic Baseball). (cute for geeky people like me, at least). The author assumes that the baseball somehow accelerates from rest to 90% of light speed without worrying about how that occurs. But, as a chemical engineer I have to wonder about the energy requirements for achieving 0.9c, so I did a calculation on the change in kinetic energy of a baseball from rest. Continue reading
Private Schools: caveat emptor
Caveat emptor: a Latin legal term for “let the buyer beware”
I was recently advised about a private school in the Greater Toronto Area that had its credit-granting authority revoked by the Ontario Ministry of Education (a list of revocations is available here). Meaning? Anyone we admitted with a required course credit from that school may have to have their admission offer revoked. Staff are looking into it, but it raises once again the issue of private schools and university admission. Continue reading
A Burning Issue
Kitchener is a city located next to the city of Waterloo, so close together that it’s hard to tell where one city stops and the other starts. They are two separate legal entities however, and in Kitchener there is a raging debate about limiting or banning backyard fires (Waterloo banned them some years ago). The debate boils down to the rights of individuals to use their property as they see fit, versus the rights of their neighbours to clean air. On technical grounds, I would side with the people who are seeking a ban, based on what we already know about wood fires and air quality. Continue reading
Engineering Admissions by Lottery?
The Tenured Radical blog on the Chronicle of Higher Education website has a post reflecting on the possible use of a lottery system for admission to competitive universities. Under this system, we would just identify everyone who meets our minimum admission requirements (maybe an 80% average for the required courses?), then run a random selection process that fills the seats. There are some tempting reasons to do this. Continue reading
Offer Revocation Season
This is the start of the season when we start deciding whether to revoke admission offers. The season starts when final grades become available, and lasts throughout the summer as we receive various exam scores and transcripts from around the world. It’s always a bit painful for us, as we have to make hard decisions in some cases. It’s certainly painful for applicants who lose their offer. Continue reading
Meeting your Waterloo
June 18 is the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the final major clash between Napoleon’s French Imperial forces and the Anglo-Dutch and Prussian allies arrayed against him, near a small village in modern-day Belgium. The battle clearly resonated throughout the western world, resulting in the eventual use of the name “Waterloo” for a county and village in Ontario, and a university named after the city where it was founded. There is also a Waterloo in Quebec, Iowa, New York State, New Zealand, and many other locations according to Wikipedia. You might wonder what history has to do with the theme of this blog, but I’ve managed to find a connection. Continue reading
Exam Anxiety in China
The Toronto Globe and Mail recently ran an article about China’s university entrance exam system, the “gaokao”. I didn’t know that “gaokao” meant “big test”, but it seems like an apt description. The article nicely summarizes some of the pros and cons of such systems, as well as the impact on Canadian university entrance. Continue reading
Climate Change Nonsense
I read an article in the National Post discussing climate change. I try to avoid reading NP articles about climate change, because they usually just irritate me. However, I couldn’t resist this time, and regretted it as usual. Continue reading
A Professor in Waterloo Engineering 