Contents

Executive Committee - 1999-2001

Committees

Electronic Voting Introduced

Masao Doi: 2001 Bingham Medalist

Society Introduces Electronic Balloting

Candidates For Society Office

Abstract Books Available At Meeting Only

73rd Annual Meeting - Bethesda, MD

Polymer Processing Society Joins AIP

Minutes of the Executive Committee Meeting - February 11, 2001

Minutes of the Business Meeting - February 13, 2001

Student Poster Presentation Award Contest

Change of Address

Rheology Bulletin Author Guidelines

Future Meetings of the Society

Executive Committee - 1999-2001

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Committees

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Electronic Voting Introduced

Beginning with the upcoming biennial elections, the Executive Committee of the Society has decided to do away with paper ballots. Voting will now be done over the internet. A write-up by Society President Fuller appears inside this issue of Rheology Bulletin.

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Masao Doi
2001 Bingham Medalist

Bingham Award Goes Overseas

The Bingham medal of the Society for 2001 will be awarded at the Bethesda meeting to Professor Masao Doi of Nagoya University in Japan. This is the first time that the medal has been given to a non-North-American rheologist, an event made possible by the recent amendments to the Society constitution.

Professor Doi received his education at the University of Tokyo from where he obtained his undergraduate degree in Applied Physics and his Ph.D. in engineering. He is currently a professor in the Department of Computational Science and Engineering of Nagoya University, having previously worked at the Tokyo Metropolitan University.

Masao Doi is known for his contributions to the theory of dynamics of entangled polymers, and he has coauthored (with Sam Edwards) the 1986 book, "The Theory of Polymer Dynamics." In the late 1970s, he was a Fellow of the Science Research Council at Cambridge University, and he has been the recipient of numerous national and international awards.

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Society Introduces Electronic Balloting

The Society of Rheology will initiate electronic balloting with this years election. In a move that will certainly be a model for our own federal government, we will move from the paper ballot and avoid the possibility of dangling chads, dimples and butterfly ballots. The process will not be completely paperless since the proposed slate of candidates has been enclosed with this copy of the Bulletin to ensure wide circulation of the information that will be necessary for the membership to properly vote. The Constitution provides that additional nominees may be added to the ballot if a petition signed by 15 members in good standing is forwarded to the Secretary within forty-five days of the date of this Bulletin. Please review the enclosed slate and supply us with "write-in" candidates if appropriate.

Albert Co, the manager of the Society's website, has designed a secure procedure to enable the electronic acquisition, verification, and counting of member votes. From a link on the Society's home page, you can access the voting site using the same login information used for accessing the member site. After being authenticated with the current member database and checked with the voter record database, you will be instructed to proceed to the web ballot form. You then mark your choices and submit the form. A page summarizing your choices will then be displayed for you to review. If all the choices are correct, confirm the submission. Otherwise, return to the ballot form to make changes and resubmit.

To ensure confidentiality, your choices and a serial number are then stored in the voting result database on the server. The server also sends a serialized e-mail containing the same information to an AIP designee. In addition, the date and time that you have voted are stored in the voter record database. There is no direct link between the two sets of records so the vote will remain anonymous. After verifying the voting result database with the serialized e-mails, the AIP designee then confirms the results of the balloting.

Please pay attention to the deadline for casting your ballot. Since this will be accomplished using the Society's website, make sure that you know your login information ahead of time. There are instructions on the web page on how to retrieve forgotten passwords.

In the future, an increasing amount of the Society's interface with its membership will be accomplished electronically for reasons of efficiency and economy. For this purpose we are anxious to assemble an accurate directory of e-mail addresses of our members. In this regard, it is important that each member check the e-mail lists the Society has assembled for accuracy. Two lists are maintained in the Society's website. One is based on the list maintained by Jeffrey Giacomin and the other is based on the AIP database. Procedures to add to or update each list are given in the corresponding pages.

I certainly hope to see you at the Annual Meeting in Bethesda to congratulate the Society's newly elected officers.

Gerry Fuller

The three-member Nominating Committee, consisting of Dan Klingenberg, Faith Morrison and Jack Zakin (chair), has prepared the following list of candidates:

Since abstracts of talks to be presented at the annual meeting of the Society are available on the Society website, abstract books will no longer be mailed out. These will, however, still be available to meeting registrants on site.

The Fall 2001 meeting of the Society of Rheology will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Bethesda, Maryland. The technical program co-chairs are Lynn Walker of Carnegie Mellon University and Robert Butera of DuPont. Local arrangements are being handled by Carl Schultheisz, Kalman Migler and Christopher White, all of NIST, and Gregory McKenna of Texas Tech University. An insert to this issue of the Bulletin provides all the details.

At a recent meeting, the Governing Board of the AIP voted unanimously to pass the following resolution:

"THAT the application by the Polymer Processing Society for membership as an Affiliated Society of the American Institute of Physics be accepted."

Welcome!

A successful student poster presentation award contest was held in Hilton Head in conjunction with the regular poster session. The Executive Committee has decided to repeat the contest for the Bethesda meeting. The purpose of the contest is to encourage student presentations and participation in the meeting and to recognize excellence.

In order to participate in the competition, students must submit either a two-page extended abstract describing their research or a powerpoint preprint of the poster. This is in addition to the normal abstract submission for the poster session. A panel of judges will select up to 8 finalists based on entries, with the final selection of the winner to be made by the judges at the poster session. An award of $200 will be made to the winner at the conclusion of the poster session.

Please note that:

• First author must be a student.
• First author must attend and be available to discuss the poster at the poster session.
• In addition to the normal Web-based abstract submission, either an extended, 2-page abstract or a MS-PowerPoint preprint of the poster must be received by the Poster Session Chair for the purposes of selection of the finalists. The 2-page extended abstract should be prepared using a 10-point font or larger, and it should be attached to an e-mail to pdoyle@mit.edu as either a PDF file or as a MS-Word file. Alternatively, the student may submit a MS-PowerPoint preprint of the poster attached to an e-mail. The PowerPoint files should contain no more than 20 slides or panels. All files must be no larger than 2 MB.

Complete details are available on the Society website. Finalists will be notified by e-mail.

The Rheology Bulletin publishes papers on the applied aspects of Rheology which are intended for the non-specialist. (Archival research papers should be sent to the Journal of Rheology which is also published by the Society of Rheology.) Appropriate topics include the application of rheological principles to a specific system, instrumentation for rheological measurements, description of interesting rheological phenomena, and the use of well-established rheological techniques to characterize products, processes or phenomena. Papers that describe the historical aspects of the practice of rheology and how these may have influenced current trends are welcome. Also welcome are papers that address the present and changing status of rheological education including papers that describe recent or current innovation in the classroom or laboratory. Consultation with the Editor prior to manuscript submission is encouraged. Papers should ordinarily not exceed about 4000 words in length. SI units should be used, but any standard style of writing may be employed. The article must have a clear message, and the significance of the work must be explicitly stated. Submit two copies of the manuscript at least three months prior to the issue in which publication is desired. The initial decision about suitability of publication will be made by the Editor. Both solicited and contributed papers may be sent to two or more reviewers. If a paper has been published previously in essentially the same form, permission for reprinting must have been obtained from the copyright holder.