Page 56 - Volume 9, Issue 3

uals had earned this distinction since the medal was intro- duced in 1959. The citation for the Medal read: “For con- tributions to understanding ocean ambient noise and in defining the limits of acoustic array performance in the ocean.”
Dr. Carey was a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, Sigma Xi, and the Cosmos Club.
Special sessions honoring William Carey are being planned for the upcoming ASA meeting in Providence.
Richard Stern
1929–2013
Richard Stern, the Editor of this magazine, passed away unexpectedly on June 19, 2013. The Acoustical Society of America awarded him its Distinguished Service Award in the summer of 2011, with the citation:
For leadership in the diffusion of the knowledge of acoustics, for creation of Acoustics Today, and increasing the electronic availability of the Society’s publications.
Much of what is written below is taken from the encomium for that award.
Richard Stern, known to most of us
as Dick Stern, was born on November 27, 1929. The year 1929 is that in which the Acoustical Society of America was founded, and the two lives, that of our current recipient of the Distinguished Service Citation and that of the Society that diffuses the knowledge of acoustics and promotes its practi- cal applications, were closely intertwined over most of the following 83-some years.
Stern’s higher education was at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he received his PhD in physics in 1964; his thesis advisor was Isadore Rudnick, a future ASA President (1969-70) and Gold Medal recipient (1982) . Stern did postdoctoral work with Raymond W. B. Stephens (Gold Medal, 1977), and returned to UCLA in 1966, where he progressed to Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, and where he served as Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Studies.
Stern joined the Acoustical Society in 1957 and was elected a Fellow in 1971. He quickly became extensively involved and subsequently served on a wide variety of com- mittees, A harbinger of the creative talents that Dick was to bring to the Society’s publications was the cover of the pro- gram of the 1973 Los Angeles meeting (for which Dick was Chair). In those days, the program covers invariably showed a photograph of some landmark in the city where the meet- ing was to be held. This cover, however, featured a 19th cen- tury style drawing of a man on a ladder pasting up a large poster, emblematic of a poster for a large circus about to arrive in town, with “advertising phrases” such as “odds and ends picked up from remote corners and cubbyholes of
GARRETDOM.” With such a provoca- tive cover, one could not help but have the impression that “this was a meeting that one wouldn’t want to miss.”
Stern chaired one more ASA meeting (Fall, 1980), and in 1984, he joined the Pennsylvania State University, with a number of appointment titles, including that of Associate Director of the Applied Research Laboratory, with chief adminis- trative responsibility for Research and Academic Programs. There, at Penn State, he led a large number of activities, many associated with acoustics, for many years. He formally retired from Penn State this past winter (January 2011), but still con- tinues to work on a part-time basis.
During this Penn State period, Stern served on the Executive Council from 1987 to 1990, subse- quently serving from 2001-2004, and as ASA President in 2002- 2003. His involvement with the publications of the Society began in 1988 with his taking over a Journal section called “References to Contemporary Papers in Acoustics” (RCPA). This was started in 1939 by Floyd Firestone, was continued over the years by Arthur Tabor Jones, Robert Beyer, and Robert Thurston. F. E. White served as the Editor from 1962 up through 1987, and legend has it that he did this by visually scan- ning the tables of contents of many journals and that it con- sumed much time. The ASA at the time that White ceased to be editor was convinced that this section was a worthwhile part of JASA, but it is probably so that no one was willing to do the job as it had done by White. Stern stepped in and agreed to do the job, but specified it be done using newly available electronic data bases. He obtained access to data bases that listed titles of all currently published articles, and he wrote a program that extracted titles that pertained to acoustics, and which classified and arranged those titles in the proper format for RCPA. What Stern did was clever and innovative, and it saved RCPA from extinction during a critical era. Later, with the emergence of free internet access to comparable data by everyone, RCPA
eventually became unnecessary
Around 1997, perhaps because of actions carried out by
the AIP for its in-house journals, JASA began to be published on CD-ROMs as well as in print, and many members of the Society chose to subscribe to the CD-ROM version instead of the print version. Perhaps because of this, and perhaps more so because of his association with the JASA editorial board
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