Editor's Turn

Fellows
Once again your Society board of governors put a simple stake in the ground starting a new strategy for getting Nominations for the IEEE Fellow award. In the past it has been a somewhat market system where those deserving of the nomination and those qualified to nominate and serve as references had to independently come up with the desire to fill out the paper work. This system has worked well for years resulting in 3 - 6 new Fellow awards to CPMT members each year (although approximately half of these nominations came through other societies for our members).
This year Jack Balde led the charge by enlisting a panel of 7 CPMT super-volunteers to make a list of our most deserving members (based on both Society service and technology contributions). The top dozen of this list were given a chance to be nominated (not all volunteers want this honor…some serve best anonymously). Then a nominator volunteered for each candidate and the five Fellow References were picked from the list of 130 existing CPMT Fellows (provide by our executive director, Marsha Tickman). In addition, the historic nomination process continued to generate a few additional packages.
Since each nomination package involves 7 engineers all meeting the same deadline, it is still not clear how many candidates will be submitted by our Society to the IEEE selection committee (it is not unusual to lose 25% of the nominations based on incomplete paperwork). However, it looks like the number will be a bit higher than the historical number, and more to the point, at least a dozen CPMT volunteers now know the high regard the Society has for their impressive accomplishments.

Temptation
This is the hardest Newsletter issue for your editor to produce. A small part of the difficulty is due to a "dead time" after New Year's Day when even the most fervent CPMT volunteer news reporter slows down a bit. A bigger problem is the U.S. 1040 tax form that frustrates and exhausted this editor most evenings during March. But the biggest problem is the large stack of great books that tempt to take up all my time that is not necessary to keep from starvation or job loss…call it March madness. Even as I type this a copy of "Hal's Legacy" from MIT is on the floor begging to be held. So far this month "Ex-libris" and "The Cambridge Quintet" have book-napped the editor for hours at a time. Notice most of these books took years to catch my attention, but there are 100s more just waiting to side track me. Successful editors must read a lot faster than me.