From: J.Paul Robinson (jpr@flowcyt.cyto.purdue.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 31 2002 - 13:05:45 EST
Colleagues The Cytometry Discussion list has achieved its 11th full year with yet another increase in membership. There was a net gain of 143 new members this year to bring the total to around 2300 - more than an inflationary increase. The traffic on our server is higher than ever forcing us to replace all of our web servers in the next few weeks in a costly, but much needed improvement to our aging and groaning network hardware. Demographics I reviewed the demographics of the discussion list and see some exciting and some concerning issues which I will share with you. First, there are over 50 countries represented on the list and this does not count those who have chosen to use a Yahoo or Hotmail account. As many of you know, I personally review every request for membership to make sure we only enlist people with genuine interests. We try hard to keep the spammers away and mostly succeed. The list is also monitored by Steve Kelley, so occasionally Steve removes personal messages accidentally sent, or blatant advertising that sneaks through. I am excited that we have 24 members from Brazil - a year or two ago there were 2. Obviously, there is a lot of activity there. Mexico has also increased to 13 members. Taking 7 of the previous Eastern Block countries there are a total of 67 members - also showing a serious increase with 27 members from Poland alone - I am certain a number of them are students who particiapted in the several outstanding courses run by Jurek Dobrucki in Krakow! South Africa used to have 2 members.....now there are 21 - I think Mike Ormerod has been repsonsible for stimulating many people to particiapte. Australia as usual breaks all the rules and for its miniscule population dominates the member to population ratio by far. 96 members. Obviously, they spend too much time in the sun down there. Concerns However, there are some concerns. Three of the worlds largest populations - China (5 members) , India (2) and Indonesia (1) are totally underrepresented. For about 70% of the world's population to have only 0.3% of the membership demonstrates to me that we, as a scientific interest group need to pay more attention to these countries. Perhaps it is something that our lords, masters and mistresses of ISAC and other cytometry organizations need to pay some serious attention to. Future meetings The ISAC meeting this year was an outstanding success and the organizers are to be congratulated indeed. Let me remind you all that the Cytomics meeting will be taking place in Wales in May 2003. I was in Cardiff a few weeks ago, just a few miles from where the meeting will be held and it is a wonderful place to see. I encourage you to consider going to the Cytomics Congress run by Professor Paul Smith. I will certainly be going. Talking of Cytomics, we will most likely be doing another CD-ROM for this meeting. It will be our second CD on Cytomics. I believe that the integration of cytometry within genomics and proteomics brings new opportunities for us all and we need to be proactive in that area. PUCL web site We try to keep the PUCL web site up to date, but it is tough. We also try to keep a balance between being informative and not going over the line on commercials. One thing we added last year was sponsored pages. You will note there are a number of banners that you can click on IF YOU WANT TO ONLY!! These banners assist us to maintain the site. We are opening up more pages and encourage you to visit the sponsors because it is the only way we can maintain our site that has over 50,000 pages of information - some hidden kaddidles of pages deep! This will allow more companies to participate and help us maintain this service to you. We don’t pay to have our site listed on any search engine, nor do we actively pursue keeping it there, but it remains the top site searched on about a dozen of the largest search engines when searching for CYTOMETRY. I use the PUBMED,GOOGLE and ANTIBODY serch engines on the top of our page almost daily. I hope they are useful to you as well. 2003 I want to wish all of you a prosperous and intellectually stimulating (you choose the order) 2003. Personally, this past year was a great year for manuscripts for my lab, and my goal is even more this next year. The PUCL laboratory at PURDUE is in for some dramatic and exciting changes in 2003. We are reorganizing the entire laboratory!!! After 14 years here, it is time to change to meet the future. I am very excited about the future of Cytometry and Cytomics.....and how we as a field of interest impact the field of science generally. We for one, will be doing much more in imaging and cytometry- imaging-cytomics type interactions. I think it's a strong area. Thanks for your support and participation in the Cytometry Discussion Forum in 2002. Steve Kelley and I look forward to bringing a record 12th year in Internet-based cytometry. If I could remember who those 10 members were who were the first 10 (invited) participants, I bet none of them would have believed how this list has grown. It was a task to convince ISAC to add EMAIL addresses. In fact, in cleaning up my office this week, I found a letter I sent to Jean Parker in 1990 pleading with her to add a box for EMAIL addresses in the membership list. They did! Keep up the quality discussion. Your public discussions are a valuable contribution to the field of Cytometry. Buy Howard Shapiro's 4th edition if it ever gets published...(I note it's now slated for March 2003.....come on Howard, get to work!) Cytometry is by no means dead. Long live cytometry. J. Paul Robinson Purdue University Cytometry Laboratories, December 31, 2002 J.Paul Robinson, PhD PH:(765)4940757 Professor of Immunopharmacology Professor of Biomedical Engineering Purdue University FAX:(765)4940517 EMAIL:jpr@flowcyt.cyto.purdue.edu WEB: http://www.cyto.purdue.edu
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