Fighting the machines

Abstract

This year has certainly been challenging for all of us, and it has certainly been challenging for the volunteers of the Canadian Acoustical Association who had to “fight against the machines”! The servers that were hosting our journal were migrated to a different host after a series of heavy attacks reported by our professional service providers, and at the same time the journal migrated to a brand-new version of Open Journal System (OJS 3.3) over the summer. The ripple effects were far-reaching as all the CAA’s automation scripts were ineffective for a time (automated email reminders, support webpages for subscribers and board members, etc.). This also resulted in making the journal preparation more difficult and at one point, the journal was even de-indexed from Google Scholar! The situation is back under control, and I am very grateful to all CAA members for their patience and understanding, and particularly to Cécile Le Cocq, our system administrator and journal manager, for her assistance in fixing our many SQL scripts and routines.

Due to the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, our annual 2021 Acoustics Week in Canada Conference was held entirely online. You will find on page XXX, a summary of the conference by the organizing committee from Sherbrooke, led by Professor Olivier Robin. I would like to take this opportunity to thank him and his colleagues Dr. Sebastian Ghinet and Professor Patrice Masson, for their excellent work and for a very well received conference, despite its online modality. I am also happy to announce that the – long-awaited proposal – of a reduced-fee membership for retired members was approved during our last CAA’s Member General Assembly. Please note that this change has since been implemented on the CAA’s servers.

You will find on page XXX the minutes of the Member’s General Assembly and on page XXX the minutes of our last Board of Directors meeting, as prepared by our Executive Secretary, Roberto Racca. In these minutes you will find, among other things, the initiatives that your board has committed to, including:

• The creation of an Inventory of Acoustical Training Programs across Canada, intended to become an online repository of all the professional, undergraduate, and graduate courses/trainings offered through universities, colleges, associations, etc.

·         An update of our Operations and Procedures Manual, to reflect the evolution of key roles over time (Editor in Chief, Media Manager, etc.). This will be available to all members through a wiki page.

·         A refreshed “Practitioners’ Corner” section in our journal Canadian Acoustics, and some beating of the drum to solicit more papers from industrial members.

·         A special section in the Canadian Acoustics journal website, to clarify the semantics of our association (for example, OJS speaks of "subscription" when we really mean "membership").

·         The adaptation of this video clip from France on “What’s an acoustician” to reflect our Canadian reality (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjUNHyM_BNk)

·         The deployment of an Ad Management System to simplify the tasks related to advertising. This system will automatically notify CAA advertisers that their “package” is about to expire and also enable them to access the journal.

The CAA is entirely run by volunteers and all members are welcome to join forces. On that note, I would like to extend a warm welcome to Professor Victoria Duda who has been appointed as our Award Coordinator. She is replacing Professor Joana Rocha, who I thank for her great service over the last years. Meanwhile, we still need help for our core website migration into WordPress as well as for the development of some starter kits for CAA Local Chapters... if you know anyone who could be interested! ;-)

But I don’t want to keep you any further from digging into this journal issue, so I’ll simply wish you all a very happy holiday season.