Pat Van Zandt and Jennfifer Edelman
prvanz@mail.wm.edu and jedelman@mit.edu

Physics Roundtable in Nashville:

It's getting to be the time of year when PAM committees begin to prepare for the annual meeting in June. David Stern will be moderating the Physics Roundtable this year. If you have ideas for particular topics you would like to see discussed send them to him at david.e.stern@yale.edu.

AIP News: AIP Publishing Services has announced a new name for its online hosting platform. The new name, "Scitation[SM]," will replace Online Journal Publishing Service (OJPS), as the service has been known since 1996. Scitation will launch in January 2004. Researchers will be able to personalize Scitation by:

• Creating, storing, and managing individual collections of articles through a virtual filing cabinet;
• Easily sharing article collections with colleagues;
• Downloading properly formatted reference citations into popular reference management programs;
• Viewing a list of publications to which they have access, whether through their institutional or personal subscriptions;
• Adding favorite publications to a personal start page, which includes dynamic links to the current issues and publication archives; and
• Quickly finding relevant articles through better search features. In April, AIP intends to add an Alerts feature, powered by Inspec, to the Scitation package. Scientists will be able to receive weekly email alerts of research published in the Inspec database in designated subject areas.

The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their report An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.(Applied Ergonomics, vol. 33, no. 6, November 2002, pp. 523-31). The Ig Nobel prizes, http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-top.html, sponsored by The Annals of Improbable Research, are awarded annually for "achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced". Prize winners in ten categories are invited to Cambridge, MA to accept their prizes and to "attempt to explain what they did and how they did it".

Previous winners include: Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, "for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay".

Dr. Len Fisher of Bath, England and Sydney, Australia, "for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit".

Robert Matthews of Aston University, England, "for his studies of Murphy's Law, and especially for demonstrating that toast often falls on the buttered side".