- Another day, another new look for the Daily Bulletin
- President requests input on interim provost appointment
- Celebrate the Season with W Store: 20 per cent off for UWaterloo staff and faculty
- New data from DESI is a goldmine for observational cosmology
- Book your holiday lunch buffet at Fed Hall now and other notes
Editor:
Brandon Sweet
University Communications
bulletin@uwaterloo.ca
Another day, another new look for the Daily Bulletin
No, you don’ t need to go to the Waterloo Eye Institute’s clinic on Phillip Street and get your vision checked – the Daily Bulletin looks different today.
The Daily Bulletin has migrated, like geese flying south for the winter, over to the Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) 3 web environment.
What does that mean for you, the reader? Among the changes is a new landing page for the Daily Bulletin that shows the current issue as well as several previous issues of the Daily Bulletin, approximately, a week’s worth. The Daily Bulletin’s left-hand sidebar has been reoriented to the top of the page. You’ll also notice a lot less white space on either side of the main column and sidebar – we’ve got all this real estate on the screen, so why not use it?
Other changes are likely coming in the medium term as we dig deeper into the features and flexibility provided by the updated platform. Keep an eye out for those. In the meantime, the main content and sidebar features you know and love—the Link of the Day, When and Where, and the positions available listing—will be right where they used to be.
You’ll notice that this migration is retroactive back to the beginnings of the Daily Bulletin WCMS experience 9 years ago – all archived issues of the Daily Bulletin going back to April 2015 were migrated to the new format by a dedicated team of staff and co-op students in University Relations, a project that took more than 400 hours of textual cut and paste and image conversion efforts. A big thank-you should go out to my colleagues in IST, Digital Communications and the wider University Relations team who assisted with the initial stages of the migration.
The Daily Bulletin, of course, predates web content by a good two years, established as a text file on the campus-wide information system dubbed UWInfo in 1993, and migrated to the World Wide Web in 1995. It’s gone through many redesigns since then, usually in tandem with wider University web changes, but occasionally it went rogue and tried something different.
The WCMS was launched back in 2011 to give the campus community an easy-to-use, flexible web content publishing platform. In 2016, a responsive design dubbed WCMS 2 was introduced, and the long march towards WCMS 3 began in 2019. WCMS 3 debuted on June 29, 2021.
The Daily Bulletin is continuing its tradition of bringing up the rear when it comes to website updates – IST reports that more than 95 per cent of the WCMS 2 sites across campus have migrated and are live on WCMS 3, and the remaining sites are still in progress and should be ready for migration by the end of 2024, which happens to be right around the corner for those of you paying attention.
That said, better late than never, right?
Let me know what you think of the new layout by sending me an email at bulletin@uwaterloo.ca.
President requests input on interim provost appointment
Celebrate the Season with W Store: 20 per cent off for UWaterloo staff and faculty
A message from W Store.
As we approach a new year, the W Store team would like to express appreciation for the dedicated staff and faculty who contribute to making the University of Waterloo a vibrant and welcoming community.
From December 9 to 13, UWaterloo staff and faculty are invited to enjoy an exclusive 20 per cent discount on everything in-store at W Store (SCH) and W Store Essentials (MC). Tackle your holiday shopping with ease and explore our UWaterloo Holiday Bundles and gifts, or treat yourself to staff and faculty favourites and cozy winter wear as the temperatures drop.
Stay in the know with the W Rewards eNewsletter. Subscribe to access exclusive staff and faculty promotions, personalized product recommendations, and special perks when ordering through P+RS.
Thank you for all you do to support our campus!
Some exclusions apply. Visit in-store for full details.
New data from DESI is a goldmine for observational cosmology
Building off the first analyses of the largest 3D map of the universe released earlier this year, scientists working with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) have pulled additional information from the map.
DESI is an international collaboration of more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world, including a strong presence at the University of Waterloo, and is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Waterloo’s team is led by Dr. Will Percival, Director of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics (WCA) and co-Spokesperson for DESI, leading the international team of scientists analysing the DESI data. The team at Waterloo, which also includes Dr. Alex Krolewski, a postdoctoral fellow at the WCA, and former graduate student Siddhardha Penmetsa, worked to check for inconsistencies based on the way the spectra of the galaxies were taken.
“DESI measures 5000 spectra of galaxies at a time and using those spectra, we can figure out how far away the galaxies are from Earth,” Krolewski says. “Our contribution to the analysis is making sure that our measurements of those galaxies are unbiased.”
The team checked the data collected with DESI to measure variations in the likelihood of detecting good redshifts. Some DESI targets are unable to get good redshifts (because they are faint or observed under less-than-optimal conditions), but the team’s work showed that these failures could be corrected for and had no impact on the cosmological analysis. This gives the team great assurance about the data.
“The way that we're measuring spectra is very robust which means we can continue to learn about the universe with great confidence in the output of DESI,” Krolewski says.
The DESI researchers have now taken the map and modelled it to test theories of gravity. The data analysis measures how large structures (like groups of galaxies) in the universe are being pulled together. The rate at which structures are forming is consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
The new results have come from analyzing the first year of data from DESI, which should span five years in total. The ongoing survey will provide us with more information than ever on how the universe is changing and why over the next few years.
“As we continue to get data from DESI, we are learning more and more about the cosmos,” Percival says. “We are now working on data from years two and three and will have some astounding findings to share in the spring of 2025.”
To learn more about the results, you can read the official release from DESI along with many of the papers released on the analysis from this stage.
The DESI collaboration is honoured to be permitted to conduct scientific research on I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation.
Book your holiday lunch buffet at Fed Hall now and other notes
Catering Services will be hosting a holiday lunch buffet at Federation Hall on Thursday, December 19 from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. "We will be offering a wide variety of festive favourites sure to delight everyone in your party," says a note from Catering Services. You can view the menu online.
The cost is $38.50 per person. Book today by calling Catering Services directly at 519-888-4700 or emailing your request to catering@uwaterloo.ca.
An Integrated Accessibility Retreat will be held today from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in MC 2036. "The Integrated Accessibility Retreat is a one-day retreat where you’ll learn how to incorporate accessible education practices into your course," says a note from the Accessible Education Project. "With an overarching goal to reduce overwhelm, this retreat is for instructors at any level of accessibility confidence. Facilitators from the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE) and the Centre for Extended Learning (CEL) will be present to help you with your questions. The day will include mini presentations alternating with time to work on your course."
This retreat is part of the Accessible Education Project within the Teaching Innovation Incubator (TII). Coffee and lunch will be provided.