The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) has issued a revised version of its "Guidelines for the Use of Major Physics Users Facilities," based on comments received on existing large facilities that recover operating costs from users. The revised guidelines explicitly detail a realistic special treatment for such existing facilities. Originally drafted in 1994 by the U.S. Liaison Committee to IUPAP, the guidelines are the result of extensive consultation with other national liaison committees, UNESCO Physics Action Council, and the physics community at large, thus incorporating a wide perspective on major facilities. The revised version was approved by the IUPAP Executive Council in September 1995, and by the IUPAP General Assembly in September 1996.

A new report by the American Institute of Physics puts the number of physics graduate students for the 1994/1995 year academic year at 13,285. Of these, 43 percent were non-U.S. citizens, 16 percent were women, 2 percent were African-American, 3 percent were Hispanic-American, and 4 percent were East-Asian-American. Considering only the non-U.S. citizens, China (28 percent), the Former Soviet Bloc (16 percent), and Western Europe (14 percent) sent the highest fractions of students. 1,461 Ph.Ds were granted. The median time between the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees for U.S. citizens was 6.5 years. The favorite subfields of study were condensed matter (23 percent) and particle physics (13 percent). For more information, contact Patrick Mulvey of the AIP Education and Employment Statistics Division (301) 209-3076. (Item courtesy of Phil Schewe, AIP Public Information.)

In September, the APS Executive Board approved a proposal by Elsevier Science Publishers to sponsor the John H. Dillon Medal, in the amount of $2000 per year for a minimum period of five years, with an option to extend the sponsorship for another five-year term. No cash award was previously given with the medal. "We feel that the purpose of the Dillon Medal very much coincides with the objectives of our journal, Polymer," said Henri G. van Dorssen, a senior pulishing editor for Elsevier's materials science group. Established in 1983 by the APS Division of High Polymer Physics, the medal is intended to recognize outstanding research accomplishments by a young polymer physicist.News from APS Sections

The APS Ohio Section held its annual fall meeting 1-2 November at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, organized around the theme of nonlinear dynamics and chaos. On Friday, Ohio University's Earle Hunt spoke on chaos in electrical circuits, incorporating live demonstrations of the phenomenon. William Ditto, director of the Applied Chaos Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology, discussed recent experiments exploiting the sensitivity of chaotic systems to manipulate their dynamical behavior in desirable ways, emphasizing the control of chaos in biomedical systems. Friday evening's banquet featured a talk by Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Physics and Media Laboratory, on musical instruments, models and machines. A co-director of a Santa Fe Institute/NATO study on nonlinear time series, Gershenfeld was also a featured speaker on Saturday, reviewing a number of the more broadly applicable recent extensions to the notion of state estimations for nonlinear systems. Saturday's program also included a lecture on quantum signatures of classical chaos by Martin Gutzwiller of IBM/T.J. Watson Research Center.

Two weeks later, the APS Southeastern Section held its annual fall meeting, 14-16 November in Decatur, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. Invited speakers gave presentations on such topics as cold atoms, computational physics, computerized and Web-based teaching methods, elementary particle physics, high energy physics, high spin nuclei and women in physics. In addition, some of the contributed abstracts were deemed of broad enough interest to merit special 20-minute invited presentations at the start of the session to which each paper was assigned. Friday evening's banquet featured a keynote address by D. Allan Bromley, as well as the presentation of the George Pegram Award to Wendell G. Holladay (Vanderbilt University) and Dudley Williams (Kansas State University). The meeting was held jointly with the Society of Physics Students and Sigma Pi Sigma to celebrate their Diamond Jubilee.

©1995 - 2024, AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
APS encourages the redistribution of the materials included in this newspaper provided that attribution to the source is noted and the materials are not truncated or changed.

Editor: Barrett H. Ripin

December 1996 (Volume 5, Number 11)

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Articles in this Issue
Two New APS Officers Begin Tenures
Data Storage, New Laser Advances Featured at ILS-XII Meeting
APS Members Share 1996 Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry
Strangelet Searches, Spin Effects, QCD Field Theory Highlight 1996 DNP Meeting
APS Council Establishes Task Force on Career Development
OSTP Releases Report on Reducing Excess Plutonium Stockpiles
Improbable Researchers Gather for 1997 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony
In Brief
Letters
APS Views
The Research Environment in a Global Economy
Practicing Civic Science: Notes From the Field
The Back Page