On Saturday, February 20, the North New Jersey Section conducted the
annual student paper presentation contest.  It was held at the Howe Center
of Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.

This year's presentations were exciting as last, but attendance was lower.  
Presentations were given by:  
Manu Tandon, on The Construction of a Disaster Recovery Site,
Dennis Hromin, on Portable MPEG Layer 3 Player, and a guest speaker,
Vishal Gupta, on How to Effectively Start and Manage a Business.
Manu Tandon won first place ($100) and Dennis Hromin won second place
($75), both qualifying to participate in the Region I Paper Contest.
Our guest speaker received an honorable mention.

Manu Tandon will be attending the conference on April 18th at Merrimack 
College, Mass (http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/7722)
to present his paper.

Additional thanks goto North Jersey Section volunteers Mel Lewis,
and Chandra Gupta who helped judge the competition.
Other attendees also filled out comment sheets which were 
collected and delivered to the participants.  The primary goal being
to help students develop their communication skills through constructive
criticism.

The North Jersey Section Presentation contest will be again held next
year in mid to late February.  Greater participation is hoped and the
call for presentations will start early in November 1999.  ALL 
North Jersey UNDERGRADUATES who are IEEE members are eligible to 
participate for prizes.

Below are the abstracts of all participants:

Manu Tandon - Stevens Institute of Technology
Title:  Construction of a Disaster Recovery Site
G.X. Clarke and Co. (GXC) are government bonds and securities traders.
A disaster Recovery Site (DRS) for GXC will enable GXC to carry out
business in the event that their primary offices 
are inaccessible for business. The disaster recovery site
will replicate infrastructure needed for GXC to conduct its business for a
short period of time.

The DRS will also have the additional capability of being expanded into a
long-term office. As part of the project the team conducted research,
designed and cost-analyzed various options available for the
implementation of the DRS. These options along with the budgets, were then
presented to the partners of GXC for approval. Once the budget was
approved the site will be implemented and tested.

Dennis Hromin - Stevens Institute of Technology
Title:  Portable MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) Player
Abstract:  MPEG Layer 3 is an audio compression technique used
for playing CD quality music on high capacity media such as hard
drives and CD-ROMS.  This presentation is based on plans to build
a portable MP3 player that uses a harddisk or CDROM as opposed to
flash RAM along with an MPEG Layer 2/3 Decoder Chip, a DAC, and
a microcontroller with LCD interface.

Vishal Gupta - Wayne Valley High School
Title:  How to Effectively Start and Manage a Business
Abstract:  Effectively starting and managing a business is an 
important topic deserving of discussion for many fields of study
such as industry or technology.  In order to start a business,
an efficient business plan must be devised.  Marketing, demographics,
business type, and capital raising techniques are all intricate
and necessary considerations that must be taken in order to begin
a business.