You might think it easy to pick out the budding young scientists in a group of kids. They would be the ones who bring home snakes to live in a box under their bed, who rummage around in the local creek looking for unusual stones, or who might even collect road-kill in order to boil up the animal's bones and reconstruct its skeleton.

The city of Nanaimo, B. C.

With his rugged good looks, unshaven face and a lean body clad in blue jeans, hiking boots and a faded, black-leather bomber jacket, Mario Bilodeau looks more like a rebellious rock star than a respected university professor. He's also the first to admit that his cluttered corner office on the fourth floor of the humanities building at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi is more akin to a sporting-goods warehouse than a haven for scholarly reflection.

Each fall in academe brings what one senior administrator calls "the teeth-gnashing time" - the publication of the annual university rankings by the media. When they arrive, prospective students and their parents pore over the tables for clues and ideas, while the universities trumpet their successes or sigh with resignation.

It may be entitled Theoretical Economics, but for the University of Toronto's Martin Osborne, the challenge of launching an open-access online journal was much more like taking a crash course in practical economics. The first issue of Theoretical Economics, published by the California-based Society for Economic Theory, will go live this spring at www.

For many universities, the annual homecoming weekend is a time-honoured tradition when alumni are welcomed back on campuses to reunite with former classmates and reminisce about their university years. But this past September's homecoming at Queen's University will long be remembered for what took place just off campus.

It sometimes takes a disaster for officials to learn some important lessons, and that was surely the case with the tragedy in Walkerton, Ontario, where seven people died and thousands became ill in May 2000 after they drank water contaminated with a deadly strain of E. coli.