1. Report from the Membership Chair Christoph Ilgner, October 25, 2008 Membership development: Ch. Ilgner, CERN PH-ULB and TU Dortmund, Oct. 25, 2007 meeting# attendees# new members# NPSS added NSS/MIC/RTSD 2008 (Dresden, Germany) 250078 (18 regular members, 60 students) 10 Recruiters: Filimon Roukoutakis, Anastasia Patsouli, Christoph Ilgner Already 312 new society members in 2008 Congratulations! This is a record for this year in memberships. Already we are 11.5% up on membership as a result of the first three [NSREC not taken into account yet] conferences. Let's see what NSREC and NSS/MIC can do to take us past 25%! Perhaps 4,000 NPSS members by the end of 2009? (this would be a 50% growth from our April 2008 total membership) (Peter Clout, after ICOPS) 3641 active members by today + 88 newly recruited members = 3729 (12/2007: ca. 2700)

2. Report from the Membership Chair Improvement in handling member requests (renewal, SamIEEE inquiries). Steps towards online application undertaken (Bo Yu). As usual: Please suggest people out of the relevant community for service at the membership desk. Best is: recent retiree + student/young professional Please also suggest members for member-grade elevation! (Steve Gold is working on this) Ch. Ilgner, CERN PH-ULB and TU Dortmund, Oct. 25, 2007

3. Report from the Membership Chair – Off Topic Humanitarian Technology Challenge Ch. Ilgner, CERN PH-ULB and TU Dortmund, Oct. 25, 2007 Hearing aids from/for poor people (on behalf of Franz Haas, franz.haas.iel05@fh-johanneum.at) Most deaf people are not totally deaf, they can hear with an appropriate hearing aid. Currently most deaf people in the developing world depend on donations of second hand hearing aids from rich people. These are sometimes obsolete and not of sufficient quality to help deaf children to learn to speak. Microcontrollers capable to perform digital signal processing are available for less than 1 $. a microphone, earphones and DCDC converters are also available for ~1$. If the hearing aid consists of little components and is a dual Layer design, production by local deaf people for themselves and the local market feasible. Work to do: Design of an hearing aid. Build and test of a prototype EC/EMI test