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| Peter Tuohy, Director - Periodicals Production Services for IEEE, gives a presentation at the Panel of Editors meeting regarding the challenges facing the IEEE traditional newsletter print model. |
I attended the annual IEEE Panel of Editors meeting on April 23-24, 2010 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. This meeting is held for the editors of all IEEE publications to learn about the latest developments in IEEE publications, new publication policies and services available, as well as where the IEEE stands competitively in the global publications arena.
This year, my colleague Heyno Garbe, the new Transactions on EMC editor, joined me at the meeting. It may have been a bit overwhelming for Professor Garbe to attend this meeting for the first time. After all, the meeting room is set for some 300 people classroom style with a large stage and screen at the front of the room. Most people attend with their laptop to follow the presentations on their computer since a CD is provided of all presentations. There is a table microphone for every four seats. With the internet access also available, it is one wired meeting! Breakout sessions are held for the separate publications so Transactions Editors and Newsletter Editors can meet separately and talk with their peer editors in order to learn best practices and the like. In the newsletter breakout session, we learned about newsletter content now being added to Xplore.
Speaking of Xplore, IEEE’s digital library, a detailed presentation is given each year which I find particularly interesting, especially as concerning the trends in topics of the most downloaded papers. The IEEE’s Gerry Grenier, Staff Director, Publishing Technologies, gave a very interesting presentation this year on Xplore usage and content. Can you guess how many PDFs are downloaded each month via Xplore? I was amazed to learn 8.5 million – yes million! – PDFs were downloaded in March 2010.
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Janet O’Neil and Don Heirman attend the EMC Society Awards Luncheon at EMC 1990 in Washington, DC.
This year’s Awards Luncheon on July 29 promises
to be equally memorable in Fort Lauderdale,
Florida at EMC 2010. |
Mr. Grenier noted Xplore version 3.0 was launched on February 13, 2010. A key new feature allows users to receive email alerts for keyword searches. We learned the top five search terms include “cloud computing” – this was ranked the highest and followed by “smart gird”, “RFID”, “data mining” and “cognitive radio”. EMC Newsletter readers will note that “smart grid” and “cognitive radio” are topics actively addressed by our EMC Standards Committee. The current number one search term (by total search variations) is “antenna” – a device of great interest to EMC engineers!
I trust you will find this issue of the EMC Newsletter of great interest as well. EMC Society President Maradei recounts her interesting travels this year and the impact of the Iceland volcano in her President’s Message on page 4. Chapter Chatter starts on page 7 – don’t miss Associate Editor Todd Robinson’s lead in article about a “new position” available. Reminds me a little of James Bond and M! History Chair Dan Hoolihan adds a travel tip to his regular column on EMC History. He must have been overjoyed to visit a museum in Tokyo that is full of historic communications equipment! Read the details on page 30. We have three practical papers from notable authors in this issue starting on page 44 while Don Heirman keeps us abreast of the latest EMC Standards developments starting on page 66. Guest Reviewer Tom Jerse provides an excellent review of the new, noteworthy book by Henry Ott on page 72. Our immediate past President, Elya Joffe, has been active in updating our EMC Governance documents as found on page 83. Finally, welcome to our new members of the EMC Society (page 84) and congratulations to our new senior members (page 87). Many thanks to Colin Brench for providing this membership news and for his article on the Society’s new “Honored Member Award” found on page 87.
I hope to see you in Fort Lauderdale, Florida over July 25-30 at the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on EMC!
Comments from Readers
March 30, 2010
Dear Technical Editor,
I would like to commend the editorial staff for the two articles in the “Practical Papers” section of the Fall 2009 issue of the EMC Newsletter. Clayton Paul’s paper on Digital Bandwidths is absolutely brilliant in putting some order in certain rules of thumb. So is David Pommerenke’s paper on EMI Failure Analysis Techniques. I deeply enjoyed both.
Sincerely,
Michel Mardiguian
May 2, 2010
Dear Editor,
Just dropping you a line to thank you for a really great issue of the EMC Newsletter. It’s always good, but the Winter 2010 issue was particularly good. The mixture of historical and technical content was truly outstanding!
The top three articles that piqued my interest are the partial inductance article reprinted from the IBM Journal, specifically including the introduction by Clayton Paul. It is the introduction that established the importance of it; without that, I might have scanned it lightly and just passed over it, because it is pretty mathematical and I wouldn’t have understood the importance on my own. In turn, your great letter from the editor notified me to look for it in the first place.
Another article I really liked was the reprint from the 1961 Saturday Evening Post. It isn’t technical at all, written by a layman for the layman, but you get a feel for where things were back then.
The two book reviews also caught my eye. A.A. Smith wrote the seminal book on RF fields interacting with transmission lines, and here is another treatment. And the review of Dr. Paul’s new inductance book, which harkens back to a book from the forties by Grover - which I have - is interesting.
There seems to be a lot of retreading going on in our business: rewriting what has already been said, ad infinitum. You see that in the academic papers that are presented on PCB design at the EMC Symposia. But these two authors, Paul and Ruehli, are above that sort of “publish or perish” mentality.
Keep up the good work,
Ken Javor |
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