Subject: March 2, 2005 minutes
From: RLaRosa331@aol.com
Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 16:19:43 -0500 (EST)


Walking into the Great Room at 7 PM, it was obvious that the Speaker 
Arrangements Committee (Marty Kanner, Peter Buitenkant, Larry Rachman) 
and the Meeting Room Arrangements Committee (Peter O'Neill, Marty Kanner, 
Sam Sadinsky) had done a great job. Food was set up and people were 
enjoying it at the tables.

This was a joint meeting with the EMC Society, so there was little time 
for business.

Telephone referral volunteers:
April - Peter O'Neill
May - Larry Rachman

There were two excellent presentations and thanks go to Murray Kleiner and 
others who arranged the meeting.

Sandy Mazzola described the workings of the Electromagnetic Compatibility 
Society and described the use of the Hyperlynx program, which figures the 
coupling between Agressor printed wiring board traces and Victim traces. I 
was impressed with how complicated multilayer boards have become, and with 
the short time allotted for analyzing the couplings between the traces. 
Hyperlynx is a product of Mentor Graphics and information can be obtained 
from www.mentorgraphics.com.

After the mid-meeting break, I counted 38 heads in the room. Seemed like 
there were more earlier in the meeting.

Marty Kanner presented his experience, observations and understanding of 
human hearing. The hearing pathway is a cascade of the outer ear, middle 
(or inner) ear, and neural network. Each has its own AGC system. (Now 
that I'm writing this, I realize that I don't have the foggiest notion of 
what does the AGC in the outer and inner ear.) The neural AGC is very slow. 
Marty's method of turning the control knob slowly back and forth over the 
point where a sound disappears allows time for the neural system to acclimate 
itself.

Marty's calibration standard is his 12 -year-old grand daughter, who can 
hear up to 32 kHz. Marty found that my left ear dropped off at 8.3 kHz and 
my right ear (the one with tinnitus) only went to 4.5 kHz. This explains 
why I have to tell my grand daughters to slow down and lower their pitch. 
It also might explain why I can't catch the private conversations that some 
of you guys have in the front of the room, but I prefer to think that you 
are not projecting properly to the audience sitting behind you.

And that's the end of my notes because I can't write when I have both hands 
cupped over my ears to pick up the sound. May you all be well,

Richard LaRosa, Secretary.