NIDCOM is now the “Standards Committee”

At the last AdCom meeting we made some changes to NIDCOM, the Nuclear Instrumentation and Detectors Standards Committee. The major change was to broaden the scope of this committee to include standards for all NPSS activities, not just those associated with nuclear instrumentation and detectors. To reflect this increase in the scope, we changed its name to the “Standards Committee.” However, the Standards Committee will continue to perform all of the activities of NIDCOM. In addition, an administrative change was made, transforming its status within the NPSS from a Technical Committee to a Functional Committee. Within NPSS, a Technical Committee is a group of members (typically more than 100) that share a common technical interest, and virtually all of these Technical Committees organize a conference. Functional Committees perform a specific function — the Publications Committee and the Awards Committee are examples of Functional Committees. The main consequence of this change is that while the Chair of the Standards Committee will still be an AdCom member, he will not be a voting member.

This change required a modification of the NPSS Bylaws. For those with a penchant for detail, the entire (revised) Constitution and Bylaws is printed below. True aficionados will note that several other “housekeeping” changes were also made at this time, such as removing the TMI Editor from the NPSS Publications Committee and correcting punctuation.

The Standards Committee membership currently reflects its history and needs more members in the new areas of NPSS. The duties of membership are to review and update existing standards and to write new standards. The request for a new standard can come from anyone who sees a need for a standard. The recent IEEE-USA newsletter describes some standards in everyday use. We doubt that NPSS standards will be as well known as 802.11b or 1284, but they are just as important to the people who use them. For example, 325 is used in every HPGe detector test and description. The standards written by the committee are reviewed by the IEEE Standards Board and become international standards available to everyone. The committee reviews 10 to 20 standards a year and writes 1 to 2 new standards each year.

Contact Ron Keyser to join the committee or submit a need for a new standard.
You can reach Ron Keyser at ORTEC, 801 S. Illinois Ave., Oak Ridge, TN 37830-7985; Phone:+1 865 483-2146; E-mail: ronkeyser@ieee.org.

You can reach Bill Moses at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, One Cyclotron Road, MS 55-121, Berkeley, CA 94720-8099; Phone: +1 510 486-4432; Fax: +1 510 486-4768; E-mail: wwmoses@lbl.gov.