Editorial

Editorials

There are 7 topics in this file:

From the President.

It is with sadness that we learnt of the death of Arthur Wilson recently, another of our great founding fathers lost from the subject, in person but not in legacy and memory for those of us who knew him. You are all invited to attend his Memorial Meeting to be held on Sunday 17th September 1995 in Cambridge. (Details are printed later in this issue).

I have just returned from the ACA meeting in Montreal which was another large gathering of crystallographers from the World with a good representation from the UK. We were more than 1100 in total, with many parallel sessions, a full general program, posters and evening sessions. Our congratulations to Jenny Glusker and Ken Trueblood who shared the Fankuchen Award this year in Montreal and indeed effectively also shared the award lecture, both entertaining a packed lecture theatre. It is hard to fit it all in and I can see that juggling the program topics for 1996 this week in Lund will present some problems for the Program Committee. However that is looking good at this stage and it should be an excellent meeting.

Lund too promises to be a splendid week and presents us with plenty of choice in a full schedule. I am looking forward to meeting our Scandinavian colleagues on home ground and in a part of Sweden I have not yet visited.

Are you working on a 1999 logo for Glasgow? (Submission details are printed later in this issue). The news there is that the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre is to undergo a major expansion and refurbishment to be ready in 1997/8, so we will gain enormously from this, and the building program the city is undertaking on the opposite bank of the river, including additional medium priced hotels. Chris Gilmore and I continue to work on the details, but we do not really get into gear until after Seattle, all being well!

It is the Conference Season now and many of you will be on the road again this summer. The BCA Council has supported a much increased number of Bursaries this year to assist members at meetings, which I strongly support. I hope to meet some of you on your travels but wish you all splendid crystallographic and other meetings and a safe return to the new academic year. If anyone has an interesting meeting report please send it to Kate, especially if you have written it already for another purpose. Please also send her news of forthcoming meetings.

May I remind members that I will end my term of office at the Cambridge BCA Annual meeting next Spring, and you are all invited to nominate my successor. Send your nominations either to myself or one of the other Officers at any time. We shall be deciding on a Council nominee in late October.

Congratulations to John Squire on his professorial promotion and also to Kenneth Harris newly appointed to the Structural Chemistry Chair at Birmingham.

Until the first of our Autumn Group Meetings.

Judith A.K.Howard
1st August 1995

STOP PRESS!!

IUCr 17, Seattle USA 9 -17 August 1996

From your President in Lund, 3 August 1995
It is not too soon to start preparing to be there, and what to talk about! Full details of the program will be given in the Autumn issue of the IUCr Newsletter and the December issue of 'Crystallography News'. The Program Commitee have done their work, the keynote speakers and microsymposia topics identified. The Call for Papers will be mailed in the Autumn from the US with a deadline of February 1st 1996. This meeting will be the first IUCr to use the World Wide Web extensively, and as for the recent ACA in Montreal, abstracts will be available on the Web after acceptance.

Editor's Note: Look for the ACA in the section 'Crystallographic Associations' on the BCA home page at
URL http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/BCA/index.html


Page last updated 6 Seo 1995

From the tresaurer

Financial Arrangements between BCA Council and Groups

BCA Council will be asked at its meeting in October to consider a proposal that the present system of annual payments to each of the four interest groups, based on the number of Ordinary members be discontinued. This is because the practical difficulties in determining the most appropriate values of these payments are now probably greater than their monetary value to any of the groups. If the subventions to groups then cease, it is likely that Council would allocate each year an equivalent sum of money to either the Bursary Fund or for increased support of the Group Scientific Programmes at the Spring Conference.

Some facts related to the history of this matter are set out below. Members' comments are welcomed and these should reach their Group Representative, or any other member of Council, in good time before the Autumn meeting in London on 30th October.

Each year BCA Council has traditionally given a per capita subvention to those of its four constituent groups having Ordinary Members, whilst Joint Members (whose subscription is paid indirectly via RSC and/or IoP were excluded from consideration amongst those for whom this subvention was paid.

Since the new BCA Membership database became available in 1994, it has become very clear that:

August 1995
Anne Bloomer

APOLOGY

In the June Issue of BCA News, there is, a report on the Aston Intensive Course. In preparing the list of sponsors, I carelessly omitted Enraf-Nonius. I wish to apologise for this omission. and state that Enraf-Nonius have been strong supporters of the Course from its very beginnings in 1987.


David Watkin
June 95

Whither the International Tables?

As I was making up this issue I received the latest IUCr Newsletter (Vol 3 No.2) which begins with a letter from the President, Philip Coppens, entitled 'What is the future of the International Tables?'

I feel sure Arthur Wilson would want us to continue his editorial work on this valuable resource for all Crystallographers. A new volume covering the many aspects of macromolecular Crystallography not covered in the current Tables is being considered. Here are my thoughts on this problem, please let the BCA Council know yours.

Other means of disseminating the information must be explored. Printing books is difficult expensive and time consuming; CD-ROMs can be quickly and easily copied and used on the ubiquitous personal microcomputers; when can we have the Tables on CD-ROM?

The growth of the World Wide Web means that soon everyone will be able to access vast amounts of information on-line. Perhaps database servers could each hold a copy of the International Tables; I think it unlikely that the IUCr server at Chester which maintains the 'World Directory of Crystallographers' would be able to cope with the network traffic if there were only one copy kept at Chester. Perhaps the introductory type pages could still be published in book form, with the Table pages themselves kept on-line. Then it would be easy for users to download the few pages relevant to their current work and print them locally. Let us know your ideas.

BCA Home page WebMaster [email protected]

World Wide Web News

URL http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/BCA/index.html
Ads like these have been put on the BCA www pages since the Easter meeting at Cardiff. People can see your position vacant or equipment notices very much more quickly than waiting for 'Crystallography News' to be printed every 4 months. I have been adding more information to the home page; you can now search journal contents pages, or look at publishers latest books. The CUP ad for Michael Woolfson's new book is the first to print a WWW address in one of our ads.

The Industrial Group Newsletter is now on-line, and so is most of the previous issue of 'Crystallography News'. Members who are wondering what became of their Protein Data Bank Newsletter should look in the PDB pages on the WWW to find out. They are easily found via the BCA home page, URL given above.

Please let me know of any other links you would like to to set up from this page.


SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AT NEUTRON SCATTERING SOURCES

A second workshop on software development at neutron scattering sources, (SoftNeSS'95) is to be held on September 21-22 1995 in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in the U.S.A. The aim is to produce a draft for an international standard format for the exchange of neutron scattering data among neutron scattering facilities and the user community. It is designed to promote co-operation in future software development and to support the user community in developing their own applications for the analysis and visualisation of neutron scattering data. A draft proposal can be seen on the World Wide Web at:

URL http://rrdjazz.nist.gov/HADES-proposal/HADES-proposal.html
Further details by email from [email protected]


The Crystallographic Tourist

Arnold Beevers visits to crystallographically interesting places have given me an idea for this new section for 'Crystallography News'. He was just leaving for Vienna to see the 'Max Perutz' library when he sent me the text of his article. Members are invited to send me short articles describing other interesting places they have seen. They may be museums such as the Crum Brown museum which we might all visit in 1999, architecturally interesting shapes or patterns such as the Escher murals in Holland or a tiling on the Alhambra, in Granada, Spain. Moreton Moore suggested building childrens' climbing frames from more interesting shapes than cubes (Sept 94 issue 50 page12). Some countries already have such things; Istvan and Magdolna Hargittai have published photographs of climbing frames in their new book 'Symmetry'. There is a truncated icosahedron (the bucky ball shape) in Hokkaido University, Japan and in Tel Aviv, Israel, there is a truncated octahedron climbing frame. Can anyone send me a photograph of an unusual UK climbing frame in a polyhedral shape? Or other crystal models, mineral collections or interactive science centres which we might visit to escape from our computers for a little while.

Page last updated 6 Seo 1995

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