How was your University start ? Quite busy I presume.
It has been already 2 months since the previous issue of the NewsLetter, and with this current edition, we will achieve the 2002 series ! Thanks to all the contributors, quite a few contributions and adverts are now published.

On behalf of the ECTN, I would like to congratulate our colleague and friend Michael Gagan (Open University, Manchester, UK), who gained an award at the FECS meeting <read>. Also, read more on a new European "Erasmus" project <read> and an "Expert" call from the European Commission <read>

December and Winter are back again as usual at this time of the year ;-) with maybe snow and ski for some of us, or sun and sand for our colleagues upside-down, ... This is also Christmas time, a perfect time to enjoy being with our family and friends. And soon after - 2003 - will arrive ! a brand New Year with plenty of projects and wishes !

ECTN Association

by Anthony Smith

ECTN Association
An application to the EC Socrates programme, under the call for proposals for associations, was submitted before the 30 September 2002 deadline. A copy of this proposal, reference number EAC/37/02/05, has been sent to all Association members. The proposal aims to promote science, and chemistry in particular, firstly by establishing internet-based certified tests of competence in chemistry and associated e-learning material, and secondly by endeavouring to enhance chemistry’s image.

GRUNDTVIG 3 Pre-proposal ? An application under the Grundtvig programme was submitted in October 2002. This pre-proposal, entitled ‘European Chemistry Tests’ concerns the creation of a formative computer-based test at a level that concerns very little or no previous knowledge of chemistry. If successful, a full proposal will need to be submitted on or before March 1st, 2003. A copy of the pre-proposal has been sent to Association members.

The next meeting of the ECTN Association Administrative Council will take place on Saturday, 8th February 2003, in Lyon, France. Any Association members with comments, ideas, suggestions, or items for the agenda, should contact the President, Anthony Smith, at least one week before the date of the meeting.

We welcome the following new members to the ECTN project:
• University of the Algarve, PT. Contact: Ana Figueira
• University of Barcelona, ES. Contact: Jose Diaz Cruz

A pre-proposal for a new 3-year ECTN project, for the period October 2003 - September 2006, has been submitted. The proposal is entitled ‘The New Generation of Chemists’. A copy has been sent to all ECTN members. If selected, a full proposal will need to be submitted on or before March 1st, 2003. A meeting of the group (Tony Smith, Richard Whewell, Hagga Schmalz, Arne van der Gen, and Terry Mitchell) that wrote the pre-proposal will be held on 25 January 2003, in order to write the full proposal. All ECTN members are invited to contact any of these persons with their comments and suggestions concerning the pre-proposal and its development into a full proposal.

The next meeting of the ECTN Management Committee will take place on 8 February, 2003 in Lyon, France. Any ECTN member wishing to have items put onto the agenda should contact Tony Smith before the meeting date.

Reminder:

The next ECTN plenary meeting will be held on 24-27 April, 2003 in Prague, Czech Republic.
Following a decision of the ECTN Management Committee in September 2002, the ECTN plenary meeting in 2004 will be held in Toulouse, France - date to be decided.

* Congratulations to our partners at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, PL. The Leonardo da Vinci project that they submitted, entitled ‘Chemical Laboratory Safety Training System (CHLASTS)’ has been accepted. The ECTN is a partner in this project. Our role will be the implementation and evaluation of new training modules, the analysis of safety legislation, and dissemination. The first meeting of the project will take place in February 2003, in Krakow, PL.

EChemTest

by Pascal Mimero

Good news for the last 2002 NewsLetter edition ...

Dissemination
We met in Beijing during the BCCE conference : I would like to thank Stig Olsson (Malmö högskola, Teknik & samhälle) for his commitment in disseminating the EChemTest in Sweden ... Thanks Stig !

With his own permission :

Oct 02 : (...) We will have a conference for chemistry teachers at the University of Malmö on 22-23 of November and I would like to present the EChemTest to our 150 participants.
Dec 02 : (...) Our meeting was all right with 150 chemistry teachers. I had the opportunity to show them one of the tests on the CD, which was OK, and tell them about EChemTest. I did not have the time to get any comments from the participants but I noticed that they had not heard about the EChemTest earlier. Anyhow they were given the internet-address for further exploration on their own.

I will add that the chemistry teachers were representing different categories, both compulsory school and upper secondary school and coming from all over Sweden. I got the feeling that they were positive to receive the information and they will hopefully use the tests in their own teaching and evaluation.

But my fellowteachers and myself at Malmö University are going to look through all the tests and then give you our comments.

Last minute information from Pascal Mimero : I already had one contact from Sweden mainly interested in the General Chemistry Level 1 test.

Demo
The Demo Test in General Chemistry 1 & 2 and Organic Chemistry 3 has already been double-checked in 12 languages.
Still to be done : Portuguese, Greek, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Hungarian = any volunteers ?

Russian is only available for the Organic Chemistry 3 Test.

Worldwide pre-testing
The Level 2 test in General Chemistry was prepared with the new QuestionMark Perception format and will be used for the pre-testing campaign. The test will be delivered either as a stand-alone PC version or as a LAN version.

I would like to thank :

Ribert Rittenhouse from Wala Wala College (Washington State, USA). From Mid-December 2002 until January 2003, he will run the level 2 test with a first group of 50 students ; the second group of 50 students are scheduled at the end of the University year (2003).
Adrian George from the School of Chemistry of the University of Sydney (NSW, Australia). A group of 30-40 students will run the test early 2003.

Group Leaders :

Analytical Chemistry 3 Milt Karayannis, Prof. University of Ioannina, GR mkaragia@uoi.cc.gr

General Chemistry 1 & 2 Kristiina Wähälä, Prof. University of Helsinki, FI kristiina.wahala@helsinki.fi

Inorganic Chemistry 3 David Cardin, Prof. University of Reading, UK d.j.cardin@reading.ac.uk

Organic Chemistry 3 Tapio Hase, Prof. University of Helsinki, FI tapio.hase@helsinki.fi

Physical Chemistry 3 Rodriguez Renuncio, Prof. Complutense University of Madrid, ES renuncio@quim.ucm.es

Dissemination, Conference and more

ICCS-03 - International Conference on Computational Science - Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation (June 2-4, 2003)

from Andrei Tchougreeff (received October 7, 2002)

From: Andrei L. Tchougreeff <wpcc@qcc.ru>
Subject: European Comp Chem List information
Dear Dr. MIMERO
Dear friends, Profesor A. Lagana from Perugia asked me to send out the following:
A session of Computational Chemistry and Molecular Dynamics is being organized at the ICCS-03 (International Conference on Computational Science) to be held on :
June 2-4, 2003 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation Those who would like to contribute with a paper, an oral contribution or a poster please contact
Prof. Antonio Lagana'
Dipartimento di Chimica, Via Elce di sotto 8, 06123 Perugia (Italy)
phone +390755855527 ; fax +390755855606 ; e-mail : lag@unipg.it
URL : http://www.chm.unipg.it/chimgen/mb/theo1/group.html
For further information please consult the URL address: http://www.science.uva.nl/events/ICCS2003/
Yours Sincerely
Andrei L. Tchougreeff
List Maintainer

6th Session of the Fock School on Quantum and Computational Chemistry - Novgorod the Great, Russia (May 12-16, 2002)

from Andrei Tchougreeff (received November 6, 2002)

PresFrom: Andrei L. Tchougreeff <wpcc@qcc.ru>
Subject: European Comp Chem List information
Dear Dr. MIMERO
It is my pleasure to inform you that the 6-th Session of the Fock School on Quantum and Computational Chemistry will be held 12 - 16 May 2003 in Novgorod the Great (Russia). The meeting is planned to gather about 100 participants from Russia and other countries. A special session on density functional theory is planned within the scope of this meeting in celebration of the 100-th anniversary of Prof. Hans Hellmann (1903 - 1938).
The proceedings of the meeting will be published in the IJQC.
You are welcome to register for the meeting at the meeting site at http://qcc.ru/~fock
There you will also find uptodate information concerning the meeting. The registration is free but you will get on the meeting maillist and will be informed about all future developments. The call for papers is expected by winter holydays.
Take your chance to be near St Petersburg in the days of its 300-th anniversary!
Yours Sincerely
Andrei L. Tchougreeff
List Maintainer

Variety in Chemistry

by Anthony Rest (received November 15, 2002)

In 1992 the Chemistry Video Consortium Project, a team of 14 UK universities, received £500,000 to make high quality videos for learning, teaching and training in Chemistry. Ten years later the fruits of this investment are: a series of VHS tapes and a series of laser video discs entitled "Basic Laboratory Chemistry", four series of CD ROMs entitled "Practical Laboratory Chemistry, "Practical Chemistry for Schools and Colleges", "Physical Chemistry Experiments" and "Le bon geste pratique en Chimie/Practical Laboratory Chemistry", and a www database entitled "Chemistry Images". This article tells how these all came about and provides hints about how to make similar multimedia resources.
[Click here to download (.doc / 2Mb) the document]
See the previous article in the May 2002 NewsLetter.

3rd International Conference on Computational Science

from Andrei Tchougreeff (received December 6, 2002)

From: Andrei L. Tchougreeff <wpcc@qcc.ru>
Subject: European Comp Chem List information
Dear Dr. MIMERO
professor Lagana asked me to send out the following
======================================================
Dear Colleague,
The 3rd International Conference on Computational Science will be held on June 2-4, 2003 as a Bi-location event at both Melbourne (Australia) and St. Petersburg (Russian Federation). ICCS 2003 follows the successful ICCS conferences in San Francisco and Amsterdam. More information can be obtained from the web site http://www.science.uva.nl/events/ICCS2003
Within ICCSS 2003 at the St. Petersburg site the workshop on
COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTRY AND DYNAMICS has been organized. The workshop shall deal with the following topics:
     a. Electronic energy and molecular structure
     b. Molecular reactions and dynamics
     c. Simulations and virtual molecular reality
     d. High performance in chemical computations
     e. Grid systems in computational chemistry
     f. E-learning and knowledge handling in chemistry
You are invited to submit to noelia@dyn.unipg.it a paper for oral presentation of length 6-10 pages formatted according to the rules of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html for instructions) of Springer. Further details with respect to the electronic submission can be found at http://www.science.uva.nl/events/ICCS2003.
Important dates are:
     December 23, 2002 - Deadline Paper Submission Conference
     December 27, 2002 - February 13, 2003 Reviewing and revising process
     February 15, 2003 - Final versions of Workshop Papers
     June 2-4, 2003 - ICCS 2003 Conference hosting the workshop at St. Petersburg (parallel location Melbourne)
Please, remember the following rules of the ICCS workshops
[1] Workshop papers are submitted directly to noelia@dyn.unipg.it and NOT to the ICCS 2003 submission site.
[2] High quality papers for oral presentation will be chosen based on a peer review base (No posters).
[3] A typical workshop consists of 10 papers. In exceptional cases a workhop can also be 5 or 15 papers.
[4] The deadline for camera ready final (after revision if this applies) papers is February 15, 2003
[5] Papers cannot exceed 10 pages and need to be in correct formatting of Lecture Notes in Computer Science rules (as shown on the ICCS 2003 webpages).
[6] Authors of the accepted papers need to register before at the time the camera ready paper is sent for publication on Lecture notes in computer science.
Yours Sincerely
Andrei L. Tchougreeff
List Maintainer

In brief ...

ECTN Perugia Meeting 2002 ... ShowRoom

by Arne Van der Gen (received September 15, 2002)

Arne, kindly provided a full set of pictures. You can now easily display them ... if you'd like to have a look on the ECTN Plenary meeting held in Perugia (Italy) on May 2002, click @here@.

Biological Chemistry ShowRoom...

by K. Wähälä (received November 4, 2002)

A couple of photos from the biologial chemistry working group meeting in Leiden. <click here>

New European "Erasmus" project ...

from A. Smith (received November 28, 2002)

-----Original Message-----
From : Projects Erasmus [mailto:project.erasmus@socleoyouth.be]
Date : jeudi 28 novembre 2002 16:19
To : SMITH Anthony
Object : Your application 10066-CP-1-2000-1-FR-ERASMUS-TN
Dear Sir, Dear Madam,
Please find enclosed a letter concerning your project.
Thank you very much for your co-operation.
Please do not hesitate to contact us for any further information.
Yours faithfully
The Logistics Department
(projects.erasmus@socleoyouth.be)
Download <<E-DGEAC.DOC>> (28Kb)

European Commission calls for Experts and Consultation

from A. Smith (Last minute communication)

The Education and Culture Directorate of the European Commission has issued a call for applications with a view to constituting a list of experts to assess proposals received in connection with the Community action programme in the field of education “Socrates” and other actions in the field of education.
Details can be found at: http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/call/expertsoc/call_en.html
The Education and Culture Directorate has also launched a public consultation on the future development of European programmes in education, Training and Youth. This is to prepare for the next phase of the Socrates programme (Socrates 2 will end in 2006, discussions are just beginning to prepare for Socrates 3). Details can be found at: http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/newprogconsult/index.html.

News flash