Director's Corner
2 August 2007
 Barry Barish |
100th issue of ILC NewsLine
The Global Design Effort was created by the International Linear Collider Steering Committee (ILCSC) under an MoU, which was initially signed by eleven countries. This MoU created my job, established an agreement and mandate to form and oversee the GDE, and was supposed to last until the completion of the reference design. We will have formally met these milestones on 15 August, the day we deliver the final version of the ILC Reference Design Report to the ILCSC and ICFA. Along the way, we completed several major milestones: I was appointed to Director in March 2005, the GDE met for the first time at Snowmass in August 2005, we completed and documented a Baseline Configuration Document in December 2005, and we will have completed and submitted a four-volume set representing the reference design, including the physics and detectors, at the ILCSC meeting in Korea in two weeks. Today, we are achieving another impressive milestone. With this issue of ILC NewsLine, we have published exactly 100 issues!
 Big cheers for ILC NewsLine |
We have given high priority for communications from the very inception of the GDE. The first issue of NewsLine was published on 18 August 2005, at almost the same time as the first face-to-face meeting of GDE members at Snowmass. I established the goals of ILC NewsLine in that first issue, saying it would “become our main communication tool for the global ILC community,” and that it has become. We now have almost two thousand weekly subscribers, plus all of those who read it directly on our website.
We have worked hard to have features in NewsLine that have interesting content for our very broad readership that varies from GDE collaborators to interested outsiders of varying technical background and interests. We have worked especially hard to maintain a very high standard of scientific reporting, whether we are covering news or technical items. The GDE has put together a very talented and enthusiastic team of ILC communicators, who are the real engine that produces our issues on time and of high quality. I am particularly thankful to them for their reactions to my draft column each week, as well as their help with changing my spelling to the international standard we are using. Maura Barone also deserves thanks for all the hard work she does to format and set up each issue, even making the inevitable last-minute changes.
We are committed to making NewsLine even better as we move forward. We will soon be asking you to fill out a survey to help guide us as to how we can improve the content and better match the needs of our audience. I hope you will all take the few minutes to fill it out.
It is a constant struggle to try to communicate how and what we do as scientists, and in that respect perhaps we should be mindful of the words of one of our greatest 20th-century physicists, Paul Dirac, who said, “in science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.”
-- Barry Barish