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From the Editor | Arthur N. Popper
We very much appreciate feedback from ASA mem- bers about Acoustics Today and www.AcousticsToday.org. We particularly welcome and value new ideas about things
we can do to make the magazine and the web site even more interesting and useful.
“History” Papers for AT
I do want to share one of the suggestions I received recently from my friend (and former ASA president) Bill Yost. I’d asked Bill to consider doing an article for AT on psycho- acoustics. Bill’s response was that he would like to do this, but he wanted to take an historical perspective and write about the history of the field. This led to discussions from which arose the idea that AT have a series of articles on the history of disciplines. The rationale is that many of us would benefit from not only knowing about a subject, but also de- veloping an understanding of where modern ideas arose.
My personal observations (and that of numerous friends) are that many younger colleagues would benefit from know- ing the early history of their fields since many of the earlier ideas and papers (e.g., before 1970) are exceptionally useful and provide insights that are not found in current work.
Indeed, about 15 years ago years I realized that my own doc- toral students and postdocs had no idea of the early litera- ture in our field (marine, and particularly fish, bioacoustics). So, we spent a year reading the older literature, starting as far back as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder. One of my post- docs started to call these “paleopapers” and the name stuck. What was interesting is that my students found that reading paleopapers was very enjoyable and invaluable, particularly when they discovered that many of the issues they were tack- ling now had been first discussed, with great insight, by in- vestigators in the 1920’s to 1960’s.
So, I want to first thank Bill Yost for raising this idea and then to invite colleagues in ASA to consider writing a “his- tory” of their discipline. This could be a broad field, such as marine bioacoustics, or something somewhat narrower like the article Bill will do for the summer 2015 issue of Acous- tics Today. Furthermore, working with Bill, I have developed
some general guidelines for how to do this kind of paper. For example, history articles should focus on the major ideas and milestones in a field, they should primarily deal with material prior to around 1960 (though discussion of very formative articles up to about 1999 would be accept- able), they should consider the contributions of major his- torical contributors to the field, and, where possible, high- light the work of ASA members. More details about these papers can be found in our instructions to authors found at http://acousticstoday.org/authors/#.VGDkEDTF8ko.
If anyone is interested in doing this kind of article, please drop me a note and we can discuss your ideas.
AT Interns
Our first AT Intern, Laura Kloepper, has been focusing on social media. Laura keeps an active AT Twitter account going with really interesting material, and she took the lead in do- ing social media for the Indianapolis meeting. This included a very exciting session on Reddit where ASA members from Laura’s own field, animal bioacoustics, spent several hours answering dozens of questions from the public, and the ses- sion was observed by several thousand individuals. This was, as we can all appreciate, good for our field and for ASA. I want to thank Laura for taking the lead in social media for AT (and making significant contributions to ASA as well). We understand that several other Technical Committees are already thinking of doing Reddit sessions at future ASA meetings, and we are very pleased that AT could help initiate this start of a strong ASA foray into social media.
I want to again put in a “plug” for additional AT interns. If you speak with Laura you will discover that she has really gotten a lot out of her experience as our first intern. She has had the opportunity to learn a good deal about publishing and her ASA network of acquaintances has grown substan- tially. And, very importantly, Laura continues to make in- valuable contributions to AT and to ASA.
I would hope that Laura’s experience will prompt other peo- ple to consider becoming interns. The position is not very time consuming, and we work with the interns to ensure that they get to do “jobs” that appeal to them and for which they can learn a good deal and also contribute in meaning- ful ways to ASA. In return, interns get a small stipend at the
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