Waterloo Region School Board Ends Gideon Distribution

For years, the Gideons have distributed bibles to grade 5 students in local schools here in Waterloo. No other religious group was afforded this access, a practice which is clearly discriminatory.

Back in November, the issue came up in the Waterloo Region School Board, and the board then voted to continue the practice.

Kudos to Ted Martin and Kathleen Woodcock, who were the only members of the School Board sensible enough to vote no.

But then - horror of horrors - it was suggested that groups other than Christians be allowed to distribute their religious propaganda, too.

Suddenly the Board had a change of heart, and voted 8-3 to end the practice.

Here are the members who voted to continue it:

* Cindy Watson
* Harold Paisley
* Colin Harrington

Shame on them.

Waterloo's "Watson" Connection

Here's Waterloo's own Jesse Hoey and Robin Cohen being interviewed about "Watson".

Looking for Graduate Students

My sabbatical will end on July 1 2010, and I'm looking for good graduate students -at either the master's or the PhD level - in computer science who are interested in working on problems in automata theory, formal languages, combinatorics on words, complexity theory, number theory algorithms, or algebraic algorithms, beginning September 2010.

You can see the kinds of things I've been working on lately here.

The University of Waterloo offers excellent financial support for graduate students. You can get information about our School of Computer Science and about the application process for admission to graduate school by clicking on the links.

If you're interested, send me e-mail (which you can find by going to my home page, and tell me what you've done and what you're interested in doing.