ENS NEWS N° 37: Intro: Surfing the web, satisfying the thirstIn 1970, Arthur C. Clarke, the award-winning science fiction writer whose pioneering book 2001: A Space Odyssey achieved global iconic status, predicted that satellites would one day “bring the accumulated knowledge of the world to your fingertips, combining the functionality of the Xerox, telephone, television and a small computer, allowing data transfer and video conferencing around the globe”. For many people then, this visionary statement probably appeared to be nothing more than the fanciful ramblings of a fantasy writer. And yet, twenty years later, at CERN, the European nuclear research centre near Geneva, British engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and his Belgian counterpart, Robert Cailliau, proposed to use hypertext "... to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will." Their joint proposal later gave birth to one of the modern era’s most universal phenomena - the world-wide-web. The age of the internet was born. I bet that for most readers, even those of us who grew up long before the spider spun its electronic web, life today without hypertext, web browsers, search engines, online payment, Google, Facebook and Twitter, would seem inconceivable. We spend an increasingly larger amount of our time trawling the web and exploring new ways of accumulating and storing information. The nuclear science community, weened on innovation, was quick to embrace this new, addictive phenomenon. Since 2003, the monthly average number of visitors to the ENS website has risen from 5,500 to the current average total of over 71,000. ENS also has an expanding Twitter account. In an age when hard copy publications are gradually being replaced by their electronic progeny, ENS NEWS, which readers can summon onto their laptop or I-pad screens in a fraction of a second, is a child of its time. With this in mind, I thought that you might like to know that over the course of the last twelve months, your ENS NEWS accumulated the not inconsiderable total of 100,000 readers. Of course, it’s impossible to tell how many of those readers are ENS members and how many are simply curious navigators surfing public websites. However, I think that it is fair to say that ENS NEWS, the content of which is provided by ENS members for ENS members, does appear to punch above its weight. Perhaps it is time now to put that theory to the test. You, the reader, are the sole judge of whether the Society’s quarterly magazine satisfies your thirst for information and is worth spending some of your precious time on. So, I would like to urge you to take a few minutes to fill in the following mini satisfaction survey. Your feedback will enable us to learn what you like and don’t like about ENS NEWS; where it needs freshening up or modernising; where it satisfies and where it fails to satisfy your insatiable thirst for information. This information is crucial to us if we are to succeed in our mission to present, four times a year, the best possible quality electronic publication. So, give an honest appraisal of what you think. As Mohatma Gandhi famously said, “Truths never hurts a just cause.” ENS NEWS would like to wish its readers a relaxing, rewarding and enjoyable summer -whether it be an electronic or electronic-free one. We look forward to hearing from you after the break, refreshed and batteries re-charged!
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High Scientific Council - Conference Highlight: TopSafe 2012From 22-26 April 2012, almost four years after TOPSAFE 2008, the latest edition of this annual conference devoted to safety issues relating to the nuclear industry took place in the beautiful capital city of Finland, Helsinki. |
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Social media – you can’t ignore them!Nowadays, each active internet user is a member of one or more social media networks. But what are these social media really all about? |
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Get ready for the ENC 2012 Career Event!The European Nuclear Society (ENS) would like to invite highly skilled young professionals, considering a career in the nuclear sector to the ENC 2012 Career Event. |
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