Page 43 - Summer 2006

We hear that...
was the header of a press release sent out by the Sloan Foundation when the screenplay competition was launched. Among the winners have been “Hubble” (the story of astronomer Edwin Hubble) and “The Broken Code” (the story of Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure).
When will someone write a successful screenplay or stage play about acoustics? Sound and music are naturals for capturing the attention of young people. Breakthroughs in medical acoustics (bloodless surgery, ultrasonic imaging, lithotripsy, etc.) have a lot of public appeal. Thermoacoustics and sonoluminescence have great media potential, even without exaggeration or misrepresentation. What about the drama of speech and hearing?
I sincerely hope that someone will write a successful script for film or television that will convey to the public some of the excitement we acousticians experience almost every day. We are told that the TV series “LA Law” dra- matically increased numbers of applications to law schools. Hospital sitcoms have undoubtedly done the same for medicine and nursing. Can you imagine what a suc- cessful series in which the hero or heroine is an acoustician would do for our profession?
From the Student Council
Andrew Ganse
The Providence meeting was perhaps slightly subdued in terms of student attendance compared to recent meet- ings—come on, we can admit it, everyone's saving up for the next ASA meeting in Hawaii! Still, the student social events were well attended—the Student Icebreaker on the first night, the informal Student Outing midweek which landed a crowd at Snooker's Bar & Grill playing pool and listening to reggae. Preceding the outing was the more structured Student Reception, hosting a buffet dinner and recognition ceremony at which Dr. Lawrence Crum was presented with the Student Council Mentoring Award. Students are greatly encouraged to nominate ASA mem- bers for the Mentoring Award; the process is ongoing and nomination forms are found on the ASA student website under Activities.
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􏰀 Neville Fletcher received the first award for Outstanding Contribution to Acoustics from the Australian Acoustical Society (AAS). The award was made at the AAS confer- ence in Busselton. Neville was especially recognized for his contributions to musical acoustics and biological acoustics. He has also served as editor of the journal Acoustics Australia. Neville is a Fellow of ASA, and received the Silver Medal in Musical Acoustics in 1998.
􏰀 The President’s Prize, for the best technical paper at a conference of the Australian Acoustical Society was pre- sented to Laura Brooks, Rick Morgans, and Colin Hansen for their paper “Learning Acoustics Through the Boundary Element Method: An Inexpensive Graphical Interface and Associated Tutorials.” This paper is reprinted in the December issue of Acoustics Australia.
From the Editor:
Selling acoustics
One of the standing committees of ASA is the Public Relations Committee, chaired by Geoffrey Edelmann, whose purpose is to make the public more aware of acoustics and the ASA. In 1991 this committee started ECHOES for this very purpose, and it also sponsors awards to journalists and scientists for good science writing about acoustics for the public. It sponsors a World Wide Pressroom, and at many meetings it sponsors a press luncheon at which reporters can meet and interview authors of timely papers. In recent years, Ben Stein and Martha Heil from the American Institute of Physics (AIP) have ably handled much of the media relations, both before and during our meetings.
Two important areas in which we have not been very successful in promoting acoustics, however, are films and television. A few years ago, the movie “Chain Reaction” misrepresented sonoluminescence (see the Spring 1988 issue of ECHOES), and I’m sure that we all know of cases in which acoustics has been rather misrepresented on local TV. That has been the case with science in general, although the health sciences and space science have fared better than most other sciences. In an effort to promote physics on local TV, AIP has created a series of short videos called “Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science” (see the Summer 2004 issue of ECHOES) and a few of them have dealt with acoustics.
The New York based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has a program in public understanding of science, which supports books, radio, film, television and theater intended to reach a lay audience. They funded such plays as Proof (which became a movie), QED, and Copenhagen. They also sponsor Sloan Feature Film Prizes at the Hamptons International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival. Since 2004 they have funded a screenplay development program in partnership with the Tribeca Film Institute, which was co- founded by Robert De Niro. “De Niro Seeks Science Scripts”
EchoesEditor .....................ThomasRossing ASAEditor-in-Chief ....................AllanPierce Advisors ..............ElaineMoran,CharlesSchmid
Phone inquiries: 516-576-2360. Contributions, including Letters to the Editor, should be sent to Thomas Rossing, CCRMA, Dept. of Music, Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA 94305. E-mail: rossing@ccrma.stanford.edu.
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