Page 48 - Jul2009

Katherine McCall (far right) presents certificates to ASA award winners
and so were eager to work this one as well. As with the ASA, entries spanned subdisciplines of Acoustics including music, psychology, speech, hearing, vibration, engineering, physics, and architecture. On the first day, we dis- cussed the philosophy of the science fair with experienced judges, and selected ASA related abstracts. We visited each of the selected projects, without the stu- dents present, and narrowed our list to a smaller subset based on quality and rel- evance. On the second day we used the special judging time to visit all of the ASA related entries and to interview the high school students. The students were well-spoken, bright, motivated, and taught us about their projects.
Katherine McCall administered the ASA awards during the grand ceremony.
We chose first and second places, and two honorable-mention awards. In first place was “Engineering a system to record head related transfer functions of sound from various directions” by Jordan D. Zesch, 17, Junior; and Angad Jolly, 17, Senior, Keystone School, San Antonio, TX. Second place was “Do you ‘ear Wha’ I ear? II. Lowering voice frequencies in real time to revolutionize hearing assistance technology” by Nicholas M. Christensen, 17, Junior, Wetumpka High School, Wetumpka Alabama. An honorable mention was given to “Violin or voice... brain food for Alzheimer’s patients” by Skye N. Singleton, 16, Sophomore, Bartlesville Mid-High, Bartlesville, OK. The other honorable mention went to “Hey, Can you hear me? Using Isobel contour
mapping to determine acoustically opti- mum seating positions in a given class- room” by Chaneg Torres, 15, Sophomore, Redeemer Baptist School, North Parramatta, New South Wales Australia. Congratulations to these students and their mentors for fine projects!
The primary specialty of all ASA judges this year was Physical Acoustics, so in subsequent years it might be wise to find judges spanning a large set of ASA sub-disciplines if possible. We thought that offering the honorable mention awards increased our impact and was a great use of the time spent on judging. In future years it would be a very good idea to provide the judges with 50 or so ASA pins and a small card explaining a little bit about the ASA, and that the student’s work was evaluated by the ASA for a special award. Students collect these pins and are thrilled to have their work evaluated by judges.
From Reno NV, W. Patrick Arnott, Katherine McCall, and Timothy Darling
Vanderbilt Research Report
The Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at Vanderbilt University, a division of the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center, has produced its 18th Research Report, which lists per- sonnel, describes research facilities, and includes abstracts of recent publi- cations and manuscripts. Topic areas include Hearing and Vestibular Science, Speech and Language Science, and Neuroscience. The report is avail- able at: http://www.mc.vanderbilt. edu/root/ vumc.php?site=rhss
Calendar of Meetings and Congresses
2009
06-10 Sept. 07-11Sept.
14-18 Sept.
Brighton, UK. InterSpeech 2009 Conference. Web: http://www.interspeech2009.org Dresden, Germany. 9th International Conference on Theoretical and Computational Acoustics. Web: http://ictca2009.com
Kyoto, Japan. 5th Animal Sonar Symposium. Web: http://cse.fra.affrc.go.jp/akamatsu/AnimalSonar. html
19-23 Sept. 21-23 Sept.
23-25 Sept. 23-25Sept.
http://www.asj.gr.jp/index-en.html
Rome, Italy. IEEE 2009 Ultrasonics Symposium. E-mail: pappalar@uniroma3.it Beijing, China. Western Pacific Acoustics Conference (WESPAC). Web: http:// www.wespacx.org
Xi’an, China. Pacific Rim Underwater Acoustics Conference (PRUAC). E-mail: lfh@mail.ioa.ac.cn
Cádiz, Spain. TECNIACUSTICA’09. Web: www.-sea-acustica.es
15-17 Sept. Koriyama, Japan. Autumn Meeting of the Acoustical Society of Japan. Web:
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