• News
  • Symposium Café proposed for Ground Zero space. Feds have never been able to accurately forecast predictions for Ground Zero space before. What has changed?

    The estimated profit for Symposium is upwards of $90,000, while a Tim Hortons would net Feds $20,000 per year. [Cut]. Capper said the Symposium "estimates are conservative".

  • Solar Panels on Fed Hall

    Waterloo air is some of the worst quality in Canada.

  • Waterloo gets Radical Cheerleading. See Radical Cheerleaders.
• Opinion
  • The constant Renaissance

    There is something about Ren's combination of music, lighting, atmosphere and clientele that allows its patrons to break from the confines of our heterocentric society and celebrate who they really are.

  • A knot of fun. ...I'm the 'friendly sender'.
  • Sex marks the spot when spirit's at stake. I think you need something more than one incident. If someone organized a sex games competition that would get people talking. But I don't think it would solve our school spirit problem.
  • A market-based model of dating. Go Amy.
• Opinion Letters
• Features
  • The evil cock-block. How is Heramb a feature? Move him to Opinion. But any how, given how our Friday night went I had a good laugh reading this week's column and someone pointed out some juicey quotes which I'll leave you to find yourselves.

2:18:04 PM   []

Concept perspective drawings for the Davis Centre Information Commons Project at the University of Waterloo. The goal of the project is to "humanize and enrich the learning process for UW students by organizing their library workspace and service delivery around the integrated digital environment" (ICDC Website). Drawings shown here evolved from user insight gathering, design requirement analysis, and user testing conducted by a design team. Usability testing techniques were applied to large scale interaction problems in physical space.

2:06:28 PM   []

Firstly, $1 million over five years is not a lot of money.

Secondly, what is an information commons? One quote describes it as:

The leadership gift will create a new resource to help UW students and researchers develop and maintain the information management skills they need for success now and in the years ahead.

The term information management skills makes me think of weblogs and wikis to store and then make available the knowledge of students and professors at Waterloo. It also makes me think of better search tools (though we already have Lexis-Nexus). This things, in my opinion, are things that the school does need. This is something useful that should be funded.

But then there is this quote:

Featuring clusters of high-end multimedia workstations, networked wireless laptops and express-type terminals, the RBC Information Commons will provide students and researchers with access to the information technology they need to investigate and think critically about the online world.

Well we already have great wireless coverage in DC (we just need more power outlets) and there are already lots of workstations. So I read this as, "we will buy newer, more expensive computers that students will primarily use to read their Hotmail". Isn't multimedia so 1990? What are we really getting for $200k/year? And where is it going?

If I was giving a million dollars... It would be either for buying the servers, software and hiring the people to make weblogs and wikis a reality at Waterloo because 99% of our knowledge here goes un-indexed.

Or, I'd use the money to build computer labs that people would want to spend time in. All our current labs make you want to slit your wrists. They are so drab, dreary and depressing. They are not places to spend large amounts of time. The only good thing is that they make our employers' cube farms look appealing.
10:48:14 AM   []

This is great! Now we have a site to find and unload textbooks.

There is another GaM article, Amazon.ca broadens Web site with used goods marketplace from today's paper which discusses how publishers and the like object to Amazon participating in the used book business.

For the most part I think they are overly concerned. Why?

• Used book stores have always exsisted
• A lot of the 'used' books sold alongside Amazon's are in fact new books
• Consumers should be allowed to resell tangible items. Imagine if car manufacturers objected to the resale of their vehicles?

10:28:56 AM   []