IEEE Florida West Coast Section Report to Region 3 and the Florida Council
Meeting
SoutheastCon, Memphis, TN
April, 2006

FWCS Section Officers For 2006:
      CHAIR: Angela Alexander [angela.alexander@ieee.org]
      VICE CHAIR: Jim Anderson [jim.anderson@ieee.org]
      TREASURER: Ralph Painter
      SECRETARY: Jules Joslow

Chapters Within The Section
      PES/IAS CHAPTER: Ghaff Khazami
      MTT/AP/ED CHAPTER: Ken A. OÕ Connor
      COMP/AESS CHAPTER: James S. Lumia
      SP/COMM CHAPTER: HŸseyin Arslan
      LIFE MEMBER AFFINITY GROUP: Jules Joslow
      GOLD: Kristy Baksh

An IEEE Student branch and a student Computer Society Chapter exist at the
University of South Florida (USF).


FWCS Section Goals For 2006:
      (1)   Process: Have all L-31 meeting reports filed within 5 days of
            an event.
      (2)   Membership: Have net gain of 10 (base) to 20 (stretch) members.
      (3)   Students: Convert 25 (base) to 31 (stretch) student members to
            regular members.
      (4)   Promotion: Elevate 22 FWCS members to Senior Member status.
      (5)   Attendance: Increase attendance at EXCOM meetings. This would
            include at least 75% of chapter chairs and meeting attendance of 20.


Section Meetings:

December:
      ¥     The New Energy Policy ÑHow It Will Affect You!
            Mr. John Twitchell, NERC staff
            The Energy Policy Act of 2005 recognized the need for a reliable international
            bulk electric system and has created a new entity, the Electric Reliability
            Organization. Mr. John Twitchell, from the NERC staff, reviewed the steps to
            be taken and the timetable for NERC's transition from an organization with
            voluntary industry standards compliance to one who's standards are mandatory
            in the US and Canada.

      ¥     Behind the Scenes at the Bishop Planetarium
            Jeff Rodgers gave a preview of the advances that digital planetariums offer.
            The computer drives state-of-the-science digital projection systems for an all
            digital full dome planetarium.

January:
      ¥     Hurricane Wilma Ð The FPL Experience,
            Mr. Wendell Payne, Manager, FPL System Operations
            On October 23-24, 2005 Hurricane Wilma crossed south Florida as a Category 3
            Hurricane leaving a path of destruction across the state. FPL, which serves
            both sides of Florida in the area Wilma crossed experienced major damage to
            their system. This included substation, transmission, and distribution damage.
            Mr. Payne shared with us the damage sustained, work required to restore, and
            general information about the work FPL had to do to get its Customers back in
            service.

      ¥     2006 IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer
            Robert M. Gray, Lucent Technologies Professor of Engineering Stanford
            University Professor Gray spoke on his research interests which include data
            compression, quantization, and statistical classification, information theory
            and rate-distortion theory, statistical clustering algorithms, image
            segmentation, retrieval, and content-addressable browsing, and statistical
            signal processing.

February:
      ¥     6th Annual Celebrate Engineering 2006, February 17th, 2006
            ÒEngineers Are Treasures Among Us!Ó
            Attendance of over 230 local engineers made this yearÕs banquet the best ever.
            The keynote speaker was Mr. Roy Truman from Odyssey Marine who shared the
            story of how engineering skills were used to locate and recover the wreck of
            the SS Republic.

March:
      ¥     Fault Calculations and Selection of Protective Equipment, March 22, 2006
            The local IEEE PES/IAS Chapter offered a 5 hour seminar on Fault Calculations
            and Selection of Protective Equipment by Dr. Ralph E. Fehr III. This training
            session was devoted to the calculation of fault currents and the sizing of
            protective equipment such as circuit breakers and fuses.


Respectfully Submitted,

Jim Anderson, Florida West Coast Section Vice-Chair
April 1, 2006