Dates and indexes.

General semantics was well represented at the ninety-fourth Annual Convention of the National Communication Association (NCA) in San Diego, California which was held on November 21-24, 2008. The Institute had a booth in the Exhibition Hall which was organized by Fordham University graduate student and IGS executive assistant Pamela Miller with the help of Executive Director Lance Strate. Independently of the IGS efforts to strengthen our connection to communication scholars, Michael Cole, who holds the Dr. Sanford I. Berman Chair in General Semantics at the University of California, San Diego, organized a program session entitled "Alfred Korzybski, Language, and the Origins of Communication Research: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue" in which he presented a co-authored paper on "General Semantics and Communication, Past and Present." The other participants included Jeffrey Elman of UCSD who spoke "On Dinosaur Bones and the Meaning of Words," and Thierry Bardini of the University of Montreal, whose paper was entitled "On Strange Filiations of the Stranger Count: Korzybski and Cyberculture." We are particularly pleased that NCA Second Vice-President Dawn O. Braithwaite will be sponsoring a session on behalf of the Institute at the 2009 National Communication Association meeting in Chicago.

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On November 11. 2008, Executive Director Lance Strate, ETC editor Bill Petkanas, and AKML speaker Douglas Rushkoff were the special guests on the Connecticut Public Radio show Where We Live. They fielded questions and spoke about the merits of having a GS-orienlation. Those interested in hearing the program can do so by accessing the IGS website and selecting the archived hour-long show.

The fifty-sixth annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, featuring guest lecturer Douglas Rushkoff and held at the Princeton Club in New York City on Friday, November 14th, had over 200 people in attendance. Before Rushkoff presented his talk, New York Society for General Semantics president Allen Flagg was given the J. Talbot Winchell award for distinguished service to general semantics. Our executive director, Lance Strate, also formally announced the establishment of the Institute of General Semantics Samuel I. Hayakawa Book Prize. Competition for the Hayakawa Book Prize is open to any book published in 2004 or later on topics and themes of direct relevance to the discipline of general semantics, including time binding, abstraction, language, symbols, meaning, communication, media, perception, consciousness, epistemology, scientific method, etc. The winner will receive a cash award of $1,000 that will be presented at next year's AKML

On Saturday and Sunday a Symposium involving fifty-four participants and titled "Creating the Future: Conscious Time-Binding for a Better Tomorrow" was held at Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus. The symposium sessions ran from early morning to early evening on both days and were very well attended. Presenters from France, India, and Israel gave talks as did individuals from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and numerous universities. The last session of the symposium was titled The Future of General Semantics. Judging from the attendance and positive reaction to the AKML weekend, I would say that future looks highly promising.

Our peripatetic Texas office manager Judy Clarke, along with her son and daughter, staffed a booth at the National Conference of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention in San Antonio, Texas in November. Judy reports that the Clarkes sold two boxes of GS books, distributed IGS literature, and had success with membership recruitment during the four-day conference.

Two new members have joined the IGS board, Prafulla C. Kar and Eva Berger (see below). Their knowledge and commitment to GS will be of great benefit to the Institute. Welcome aboard, folks!

Prafulla C. Kar is the Director for Contemporary Theory and General Semantics in Baroda, India. He was formerly Professor and Chair of the Department of English at M.S. University at Baroda. He has a PhD in American Literature from the University of Utah and was a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at the Universities of Texas at Austin, and California at Berkeley, and a Fellow of The School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College.

Eva Berger, the Dean of the School of Media Studies, Academic Studies, The College of Management, Tel Aviv, Israel, has been studying and teaching General Semantics for many years since she first encountered the field as a student at the Media Ecology Program at NYU, where she received an MA and PhD in Media Ecology. Since returning to Israel in the early 1990's, she has taught a GS course every year at the undergraduate level.