The Administrative Committee of the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society met at the Town and Country Hotel, San Diego, CA on November 10, 2001 on the last day of the NSS/MIC meeting. As usual, this, our annual meeting, was somewhat better attended than our other meetings during the year.

We had several reports, one by our Division IV Director, Peter Sacker and one by our Society President, Peter Winokur, with input from our Finance Committee Chairman, Hal Flescher, all focusing on IEEE's fiscal state. IEEE is now taxing societies to support its central activities. This is because they have lived on unbalanced budgets and relied too heavily on unusually high stock market returns for the last several years. These returns were estimated at much too high a rate for the last two years and so reserves have been reduced rather catastrophically. Most of IEEE's available funds are now held in society reserves, and TAB has put a general cap on unbudgeted spending. Another area contributing substantially to IEEE's fiscal woes is that of initiatives. Some of these have been of great value, or will be of great value to the whole Institute, particularly in regard to electronic library, search engine and publishing initiatives. Others have been a rather foolish waste of money such as Millennium medallions and the hiring of an expensive advertising company to change the logo and general image. Other untoward expenditures continue in overseas locations of board meetings where there is no clear evidence that the board is encouraging local IEEE membership growth. The Board continues to struggle with developing a viable financial plan and with figuring out how core functions and services are going to be supported. In fact, just identifying these items seems to have been a time-consuming struggle. We all hope to see the Institute resume an even keel in the near future, with a better-balanced and realistic financial plan that will not tax societies to the point of rebellion. Why spend a lot of effort in being fiscally responsible, vigilant and diligent when those funds are going to be taken over by the less careful and wise?

Our Treasurer, Ed Lampo, reported that, even with the Institute tax, NPSS will come out very slightly ahead in 2001. There are, however, still some conferences that have closed late and there will be a penalty assessed for that. How we will meet the challenge budget for 2002 is uncertain but all conferences and publications will work hard to maximize returns.

Technical Committee Reports

CANPS: The 2001 Real Time Conference is still in the closing process. Christian Boulin is working on finalizing this. It is realized that this conference, especially when held abroad, but even in North America, needs closer supervision and help in adhering to IEEE and NPSS meetings guidelines. J-P Martin of the University of Montreal, the 2003 chairman, will have assistance from Patrick LeDû and a program committee as well as from our Conference Planning Committee, as needed.

The 2001 Fusion Engineering Conference was postponed to January 22-25 since it was originally scheduled right on the heels of the September 11 atrocities. The chairman, Phil Heitzenroeder of PPPL takes over, as of January 1, 2002, as chair of the technical committee. Many thanks to Dick Foley for his service!

The NIDcom continues its work in revising and developing new standards. The CZT standard remains in flux.

The 2001 NSS/MIC sponsored by the Nuclear and Medical Imaging Sciences (Joel Karp. Chair) and Radiation Instrumentation (Glenn Knoll, chair) technical committees had a highly successful meeting in San Diego with Tony Lavietes as general chairman. There is a strong effort to make sure these two TCs have parity in planning this meeting since attendance is about equal for both interest groups. There is some question, perhaps more general than specific to this conference, about what and how information and means to get things done is transferred from one conference organizing committee to the next. Some groups have good transition models. Others are exploring how to best achieve continuity, especially in things like computer room set-up, conference record preparation, training guest editors, and so on. This year electronic abstract submittal and registration were used for most papers, as was the use of electronic presentation projection. Future conferences will be in Norfolk, VA, 2002; Portland, OR, 2003; and Rome, Italy 2004. Glenn Knoll will step down as RI chair to be succeeded by Ron Keyser of Perkinelmer's ORTEC Division. Glenn has served as Editor-in-Chief, RI chairman and in many other NPSS roles. We hope that, in addition to continuing as the RI past chairman, he will be back on AdCom with another hat before too long.

Bruce Brown, the new Particle Accelerator Science and Technology chairman reported on the High Energy Physics community's meeting at Snowmass in the last Newsletter. We need to get a good assessment of our participation there. Although PAC was founded by NPSS and run by PAST until 1995 when APS DPF became a partner, this is the first time NPSS has had a strong presence at Snowmass where excellent presentations were made by IEEE people on emerging and necessary technologies. PAC01, held in Chicago with Yanglai Cho as chair, was very successful and the books should be closed by now. The 2003 PAC will be held in Portland, OR with Bob Siemann of SLAC as general chairman. Both Bruce Brown and Alan Todd are on the organizing committee. A site and chairman for PAC05 are being considered. Stan Schriber of LANL will chair PAC07, which will most probably be held in Albuquerque. The IEEE particle accelerator community needs to be reinvigorated and made more visible, and IEEE NPSS's role in this field has to be made more visible to the international community.

Bob Parker, chair of Plasma Sciences and Applications reported that the 2002 PSAC award will go to Igor Alexeff, our past president and long-time participant in numerous NPSS activities. Bob and Peter Turchi, chair of the Pulsed Power technical committee both noted that the joint Pulsed Power/ICOPS conference was very successful with about 1000 attendees and two short courses and that they are moving toward another joint conference in 2007 with Edl Schamiloglu as the chair. Other ICOPS conferences in between will be in Banff, Alberta in 2002, possibly in Seoul, Korea in 2003, though there are some questions about this, in Baltimore in 2004, Monterey in 2005 with Pulsed Power either just before or just after it, also in Monterey, and in Traverse City, MI in 2006.

Pulsed Power 2003 will be held in Dallas with Mike Giesselmann of Texas Tech as chair. Peter Turchi will be succeeded by Bob Reinovsky of LANL as the Pulsed Power TC chair. We are sure Bob will continue the yet-unbroken line of excellent Pulsed Power chairs.

Mark Hopkins noted that Ken Hunt will chair the 2002 NSREC, which will have special material on radiation effects at temperature extremes, and that Alan Johnston will chair the 2003 NSREC in Monterey. The 2004 conference will probably be held in Atlanta.

Functional Committee Reports

Erik Heijne, the Transnational chair, announced that the committee membership is now 11, and 9 of them had met in San Diego during NSS/MIC. Erik feels this should be a short-lived committee, maybe 10 years at most, with the roles of providing input to AdCom from outside North America and assisting in promoting NPSS events that are held outside North America. In addition they will promote IEEE NPSS chapter development in regions 8-10, work on getting more senior members and fellows, and continue to help in sorting out IEEE's understanding of what non-US institutions are fully accredited, degree-granting entities. We still have offshore members who are not of proper membership status because of this.

The Conference Policies Committee has been revamped with Ray Larsen as chair and Lou Costrell, Hal Flescher, Patrick LeDû, Ed Lampo, Tony Lavietes and Peter Winokur as members. The revised CPC document, which should be studied by all presumptive conference chairs, along with the IEEE Meeting Organization Manual, is accessible from the NPSS web site (hibp.esce.rpi.edu/~connor/ ieee/ieee_Complete.pdf and hibp.esce.rpi.edu/~connor/ieee/TableCnt.pdf) along with useful financial and other documents.

The deadline for 2002 nominations for the Shea and Merit awards is May 15, 2002. See the NPSS web site for forms and instructions, or contact Ron Jaszczak, the NPSS Awards chairman (rjj@dec3.mc.duke.edu). We need all TC chairs and TC members to work at selecting the best of each community as nominees for these awards! The Phelps Travel Grants to assist students and others to attend short courses can be applied for through the conferences that offer short courses. They are allocated in proportion to the conference and short course attendance. Contact Ron if you have questions.

Our membership, reports Vern Price, remains relatively static with about 98% of senior members renewing membership yearly and about 87% of regular members. Regular recruiting at conferences helps to maintain the level. International student memberships are a problem because there is often not a faculty person to sign off on them. Vern is seeking solutions to this impediment. Vern also reported that 4 new chapters were formed in Region 8 in 2001. Our Chicago chapter, on the other hand, seems to have gone out of business.

Do you know that our AdCom is almost the only one that prohibits two consecutive terms for elected members? We are considering whether the Bylaws should be changed to accommodate two terms.

Publications continue to be highly successful. TMI is number one of the IEEE publications. Our other journals are also well regarded. TPS is beta-testing the new Manuscript Central system at IEEE Publishing and it is coming out on time. The 2001 page count is ~1000 pages. Once Manuscript Central is beyond beta-test journals should come out more rapidly. Many ideas were tossed about for ways to grow TPS. This will doubtless be the source of future conversations. TNS had 8 special issues in 2001. One, the NSREC conference proceedings, had to be reissued because of the poor quality. This has led to a more costly fully edited publication path for TNS. The Newsletter shows very uneven reporting by the various technical committees. At the very least there should be pre- and post-conference reports plus annual reports on research and new topics. The TC chairmen are responsible to make these articles happen. Please give our stalwart editor, Ken Dawson, some help! And remember those committee member lists, too.

Peter Clout noted that 15,000 NPSS brochures had been printed and about 3,300 remain. The booth has circulated to several conferences and has generated interest. The website is being redesigned, but RPI (Ken Connor) will continue to host it.

Gerry Rogoff, our Coalition for Plasma Science liaison, who is also CPS chairman reported that CPS continues its efforts to educate the public and Congress about the benefits to the public of all areas of plasma science. They have an active K-12 teachers' training program and they are working on short write-ups describing a number of areas such as lighting, space plasmas, and fusion, with others to come. They also have a well-developed web site with some interesting material posted. Take a look: www.plasmacoalition.org.

The Sensors Council seems to be doing well. The journal now has about 3000 subscribers and the editors receive approximately one article a day, says Bill Moses, and the first IEEE Sensors Conference will be in June 2002. Erik Heijne will be the sole NPSS rep to the council through 2002.

Hal Flescher, the liaison to the RADECS conference, reported that the meeting opened on September 10, with little disruption from the events of September 11. There were about 400 attendees and many papers of technical merit. In 2002 there will be a smaller conference in Padua. The leadership will change in 2002 with a new president from Alcatel.

Phil Heitzenroeder described some of his experience working with IEEE Conference Services. They did site inspections for the Symposium on Fusion Engineering, reviewed contracts and assessed maximum financial liabilities. They assisted with moving the conference dates following September 11 and were able to secure a contract with no deposit required. They are handling banking and registration and Phil has access to all sorts of very useful information that he can get on-line. The biggest problem is that a conference doesn't get dedicated attention. It would also be useful to have a standardized web page format that provided receipts for abstract and manuscript submittals and that also posted the templates for abstracts and manuscripts. You can pick and choose among the services offered. Most are fee for service but contract evaluation is free. A number of individuals have responsibility for different aspects of each conference. Better integration is desired — perhaps one spokesperson on top of all the facts as is the case with most professional conference management companies, regardless of how many people are working behind the scenes.

Paul Dressendorfer discussed the costs of fully edited transactions. These are expensive, but so many errors are introduced when there isn't full editing with manuscript review by authors that we can't afford the poor quality, so we have to figure out how to cover the large cost increases. Voluntary page charges usually get a 40 to 90% rate of return. For Transactions that are principally expanded and reviewed conference papers, the conferences might budget the costs and include them in registration fees, or there might be an author page charge. This is an issue which will be discussed and resolved at a future meeting. We must have the high quality of fully edited transactions (witness the disaster with the last NSREC papers and the need to reprint and redistribute that issue) and we must be able to pay for this service without bankrupting the society. Paul Dressendorfer is forming a committee to study this.

Bruce Brown proposed a motion that would allow PAC to post all past transactions and conference records from 1963 to 1993 on the web. They would cover the cost of scanning and posting the material. IEEE would continue to hold the copyright and would be provided with the electronic files. There has to be a way to pay for this and perhaps it can be budgeted in the 2003 PAC conference, and a cost analysis has to be done. With NPSS support, the IEEE Copyrights Office may grant permission.

A motion was presented to provide some Chapter support beyond the start-up funding already allocated. This would start in 2003 and be at the Treasurer's discretion.

Technical cosponsorship of the 27th International Conference on Infrared and Millimeter Waves was approved. Both Richard Callis and Robert Parker are heavily involved and Rick Temkin, a long-time NPSS member, is program chair. Cooperation with the 7th World Conference on Neutron Radiography was also approved.

The next meeting of AdCom will be on March 2 at the Hyatt New Brunswick, following a one-day retreat at IEEE Headquarters in Piscataway on March 1.

Albe Larsen, the NPSS Secretary can be reached at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, P.O. Box 4939, Stanford, CA 94039; Phone: +1 650 926-2748; Fax: +1 650 926-5124; E-mail: amlarsen@slac.stanford.ed