Meeting Briefs

Texas Section, October 4-6, 2001

The APS Texas Section held its annual fall meeting in October at Texas Christian University in Forth Worth, TX, jointly with the corresponding sections of the American Association of Physics Teachers and the Society of Physics Students. The program featured several plenary speakers focusing on topics of general interest, including the Society's own Robert Park, "speaking about whatever he likes"; Ronald Walsworth of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory on the real story behind "stopping light"; Neal Lane, former science advisor to President Clinton and now at Rice University; and 2000 Nobel Laureate Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments. The evening's banquet speaker was Nowell Donovan, a professor of geology at TCU, who described the unique meteorite collection housed at TCU and the plans for a Smithsonian Institution facility to study them. There were also invited sessions on applied physics and materials science and quantum thermodynamics, as well as special interest sections on chemical physics, physics jobs in industry, and the use of WEB-CT in classes. In addition, the AAPT offered several workshops for teachers.

Ohio Section, October 19-20, 2001

The APS Ohio Section held its annual fall meeting in October at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, OH. The meeting program featured a plenary session on novel techniques in physics pedagogy, summarized by an impressive list of speakers who have made significant contributions to the field of physics education. Wolfgang Christian of Davidson College described a new approach to authoring interactive curricular material, while Mano Singham of Case Western Reserve University described the challenges of transforming education research into classroom practice. Robert Lopez of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology spoke on applying symbolic computing to methods of mathematical physics. And David Vernier of Vernier Software and Technology presented his favorite physics demonstrations over the past 20 year