Major action items:
The meeting was called to order at 7:32 pm with 43 people in attendance. The items of business were:
Thanks to Glynn Holt for being the TPOM representative and organising the meeting. The TC felt that having PA and BB sessions next door to each other was great and should be encouraged for future meetings if possible. We had three special sessions and co-sponsored a session in honour of David Blackstock. There was a one day Topical Meeting on Shock Wave Therapy run by Michael Bailey and Pei Zhong
Special thanks to Floyd for providing a bottle opener at the TC meeting.
This meeting will be the 75th birthday for the ASA. There will be a tutorial by Leo Beranek on Monday night. The banquet will be on Tuesday night and will be a reflection on the past and will include a movie presentation. Wednesday has been chosen as the "birthday" day. The morning session will be a special plenary session which will reflect on the future of the ASA. Wednesday afternoon will have no formal events and is left for people to enjoy New York City.
The TC meetings in New York will be all scheduled for Thursday evening and it was decided to combine the PA TC meeting with the BB TC for this meeting because of the overlap between the two TCs.
BU/BV is planning the following special sessions for New York:
We will be co-sponsoring: Robert E. Apfel Memorial Session which will be organised by Larry Crum and Ron Roy. There is plan to have a special ARLO issue associated with the Bob Apfel session. Presenters in the session will be encouraged to submit manuscipts (deadline in the spring - before the meeting) for publication later in the summer. Carr Everbach will be the contact person for this issue.
Our TPOM representative in NY will be Jeff Ketterling. If you are willing to be a special session chair please let me know.
We are planning the following special sessions
I would also like to add that Signal Processing is planning a special session on "Beamforming with large 2D arrays" and the Education Committee is planning a session on Acoustical education and medical arts" which appears to be focussed on the acoustics that is taught to MD.
Tom Matula agreed to the the TPOM representative for BB at this meeting.
Special Sessions ideas that have been suggested are:
We are also going to investigate whether the Research on Calculus Kinetics (ROCK) society would be interested in having a joint meeting with us. The ROCK society consists of MDs and PhDs who are interested in kidney stone formation and lithotripsy. The TC thought that this would be a good experiment in trying to connect with people who are users of the technology that we work on. It was suggested that the meeting will need to be held at the end of the week and maybe even on a weekend to work with the clinical schedule of the MDs.
The Fall 2005 meeting will be in Minneapolis and the Spring 2006 meeting in Providence. Ideas for special sessions are welcome and strongly encouraged.
Our current Student Council representative, Tyrone Porter, ended his term at the Austin meeting. The representatives serve for two years, are expected to attend all four meetings during their term, and carry out sub-committee work between meetings. The ASA provides $500 for each representative per meeting to help cover travel and lodging expenses. It is expected that the student's home institution or advisor will help cover the remaining expenses.
I am requesting nominations for the next student representative. Nominations should consist of:
A subcommittee of the current and past chairs of the TC and the past student representative will select the next student representative. The deadline for nominations is Friday 12th December 2003.
We were asked for feedback on the new electronic manuscript system for JASA, known as Peer XPress (PXP) and the comments were all positive.
Allan Pierce would like a list of distinguished acousticians who have died in the past three years and have not had obituaries printed in JASA. If there is anyone you feel should have been recognised in JASA who has not been please let either myself or Allan know.
The PACS numbers that are used to classify articles are updated every two years. The next update is in 2005 and suggestions need to be submitted by July 2004. There was a feeling in the TC that perhaps the current PACS numbers are not optimised for the BB TC. A subcommittee consisting of Ron Roy, Brian Fowlkes, Michael Bailey, Robin Cleveland, and Floyd Dunn agreed to look at the PACS numbers. If you would like to be involved in this effort please let me know.
The Vice-President of the ASA would like to reflect on the role of special sessions at ASA meetings. The response at the meeting was the the status quo is fine. I need to respond to the VP in the next couple of weeks, please let me know if you have any comment on this issue.
Bill Yoost has drafted a statement on ethics (human subjects, non-human subjects, general ethics) for the ASA. The current plan is that all authors will need to "sign" (in hand or electronically) this ethics statement before submitting presentations or papers to the ASA. There was an outcry in the TC about whether such a statement was necessary.
I did voice the concerns at the TC meeting on Friday. Apparently there was a similar outcry in the Animal Bioacoustics TC. Bill Yoost and Charles Schmid indicated that an ethics statement is necessary to protect the ASA from legal action in the case of unethical behaviour by authors. It was stated that in the recent past journals who have not had an ethics statement in place have got into more trouble than the author when an ethical problem has arisen. This has led almost all organisations to adopt an ethics statement.
I will aim to get a copy of the draft statement and circulate it to the TC.
Ben Stein from the AIP is planning on revamping a flier entitled "Science is a Sound Investment". This flier is sent out to members of congress to show them how basic research can impact everyday life. If you have any feedback on how the current flier can be improved, in particular we are looking for new images (perhaps a 3D image of a fetus?), please let me know.
Bob Keolian mentioned that there had been many problems with computer switching at the podium during the meetings and that lots of time was spent restarting computers. It was suggested that authors be encouraged to bring their presentations on a removable media (CD or USB drive) so that it could be loaded onto one computer in the session. The general feeling was that this would be a good idea - although there was concern about PC vs Mac compatability particularly with fonts and equations. The conclusion was to attempt this on a voluntary basis in the future if the session chair is willing to supply a computer.
The meeting was adjourned at 8:28 pm.
Respectfully submitted,
Robin Cleveland